The Jagged Nail

Celú was once a small village near the Alsace region in France. Its buildings were of an old Germanic style with off-white walls crisscrossed by tar-black beams. These tremendous wooden struts acted as cantilevers and supports for the double-jettied structures that were responsible for the buildings’ top-heavy appearances. Huddled together on the narrow crease that was Celú’s great valley these buildings and their lumbering frames often had at least two flag poles jutting out at strange angles, flying both French and German national colours; and above them were the classical thatch rooves almost always punctuated with at least two dormers.
It was often joked that one must consult a neighbour before opening their upper windows for the roads that wound up and down the hilly foundations of this small village were notoriously narrow. The windows of one house often opened directly onto another, or would be left impotently stumped against the slanting roof of another nearby home for the houses in Celú were not built parallel to one another. The whole village seemed to be constructed in a way that was deliberately off-setting to those who visited; the roads were difficult to navigate and on occasion would taper down to an impassable point no wider than an inch with no warning and for no good reason.

This was the memory of Celú. A quaint and strange place with no rhyme or reason. A place neither Germany nor France seemed to want. A place that was recorded throughout history as alienating and uncomfortable. A place that birthed no one of merit or eminence. A place that did no trade and had no economy but somehow remained a place nonetheless.

No one really knew the history of Celú but it was felt in the bones of those who visited. Mitch slowly rolled his sky-blue Volvo truck along the road of a tremendous dam and he looked out across the lake that shimmered beneath the moon and which reflected the great cyclopean peaks of distant mountains. Beneath those waters laid Celú for at one point after the war, or perhaps during it, the original village of Celú had been sacrificed for the construction of the very dam that Mitch drove upon. Those old medieval homes and cobblestone roads had been lost under two leagues of water. Mitch glared out at the lake; he felt a sense of anxiety at the thought of a whole village resting beneath it before turning back to face the strange and drab prefab homes of Celú number two. This newer village had been flung haphazardly against the slanted edge of the nearest mountain and it could only be described as the effluence of bureaucracy.

It had to be assumed that those who insisted on remaining after the construction of the dam had been provided with sub-par houses as part of a poorly-funded estate. The greying roughcast pebble-dashed walls had been left to accumulate grime and filth that stained around each crease, sill, and PVC frame that punctuated the plain square face of every home. Many of the buildings showed signs of infestation by pitiful outgrowths of proliferating vines poking out from the gutters that lined the skillion rooves, behind which lay the moss-ridden fences that enclosed each home’s garden. As Mitch drove on he noticed smashed windows repaired with flapping bin-liners, crisp packets floating through the wind, and plastic furniture being slowly consumed by unmanaged lawns no larger than a desk. What cars he saw were of makes and brands he could not recognise and many had flattened tyres or were left elevated on piles of bricks with no tyres whatsoever.

And not even these homes had been built in parallel. Mitch’s truck struggled to ease its way around the hobbled complex of confused buildings in the sepia lighting of Celú’s flickering lamps. The pavements were distinctly modern but lacked any sense of direction with inelegant and broken turns that culminated in the road in front of Mitch being suddenly bisected by a curb that led nowhere. Ahead of him he could see his destination which appeared on the very edge of the town near some fields. There Mitch could see several portacabins and shipping containers placed there by Cantra Inc. for the purposes of housing construction equipment that would be used to build tourist-friendly hotels. But the portacabins were at the end of a road that had no junctions or means of access bar the one Mitch was on at the moment, and yet the pavement that ran across it appeared to prevent access for a lorry as large as his. Mitch knew there had to be a solution for the portacabins had been dropped off by someone, he just had to do what they did to get there.
Mitch was ready to reverse the truck away and try to find another route when he noticed some children off in the distance. It was late--after midnight--but he hoped the children may help. Zipping up his jacket and leaving his truck Mitch soon felt the cold and biting Autumnal air of France rush through the cab and prick his cheeks. Stepping down onto the floor he left the truck idle quietly behind him while he walked forward, by about a metre, and squinted towards the darkness where the children played. They were running up and through the gaps of each container but he could see little of them besides brightly coloured coats and hats that disappeared around corners and were obscured by the lengthy and skewed shadows cast by his truck’s lights.

“Uh, bonsoir!” Mitch cried out hoping to catch their attention. “Vous ne devriez pas y jouer. Ils ne vous appartiennent pas. Ils sont privés!” The children stopped quite suddenly as he cried out but he still could not see their faces. They remained hidden between the rows of each metal container and their torsos and shoulders were entirely obscured by the oblique shadows those metal cuboids cast. Mitch nervously glanced over to the windows of the nearest house in the hopes that he might notice someone who could assist but not even his shouting appeared to rouse interest from the residents. All the windows were black. “Uh,” Mitch groaned audibly before crying out, “Savez… Savez-vous comment je peux atteindre ces cabines?”

“Demande à quelqu'un!” one of them cried out.

“Ask someone? I’m asking you, you little shit,” Mitch muttered to himself in frustration.

“N'importe qui!” another child cried out, their voice appearing to be muffled or obstructed in some manner. Mitch imagined a scarf, or perhaps a hood, as was typical for teenagers. Nonetheless he remained utterly perplexed before glancing over to the nearest house which was suddenly in possession of a single illuminated room on the ground floor.

“Go on!” one child cried. “Cette maison! Knock that house there. Someone will help.”

Mitch hesitantly began to step back and noticed that the children walked forward as well. For a moment, he felt entranced by the ominous silence and hidden intent of the children that loomed over him as he stumbled backwards. But when he stumbled too far and knocked himself against the front of his truck he was startled to a point of terror. It took only a moment for him to catch his breath and chuckle to himself as he secretly felt relief that the tension had dissipated. He looked back to the children and laughed at his own nervousness before slamming shut his truck’s door and locking it.

The children are only being mischievous, he thought. There is no need to be scared.
He then began to walk towards the front path of the house that beckoned him with the amber light of the bottom floor window. He pushed past the damp and rotten wooden gate that framed the feeble garden and was quickly assaulted by a wretched smell of acidity, oil, and sewage. It was not a natural smell. Mitch wondered if it was perhaps some runoff from the lake but as he came nearer to the front door--whose screen was left hanging askew on only one hinge--he could make no mistake that it was the building and nothing else that stank. He glanced towards the living room with its netted curtains and saw a television playing through the stained and warped glass. He reached forward and gently rapped his knuckles against the plastic door.

It immediately threw itself open and from it poured an unfathomable tide of blackened and sooty water that had filled the hallway behind it from top to bottom. The barrage knocked Mitch back and consumed him, forcing him to firmly shut his mouth and hold his breath while trying to flail and roll over onto his front so that he might crawl away. The tide was freezing and its wretched smell assaulted him even as he clasped one hand over his nose. Eventually it subsided and Mitch rose from the pathway quivering and in a state of total shock. He glanced back towards the window and saw only a decrepit room devoid of all life. The plasterwork was sagging with only a few soggy patches of wallpaper left clinging to it. The television was left smashed on the centre of the floor and was covered in moss and algae. The light fixture was rendered from the ceiling and left dangling in a nearby corner.

Dishevelled and feeling unwell Mitch turned around and saw a single child clutching the handle of his truck’s door. The child had their feet up on the side of the cab and was pulling furiously in order to open it. Still reeling from confusion Mitch ran forward and cried out to the child,

“Stop it! Stop it now!” By the time he was near them the child had taken to kicking the sides of his truck while giggling inanely. “Get away!” Mitch shouted as he grabbed the child and pulled them back with some force sending the little one stumbling back. They quickly gathered their footing and ran off towards the nearby house and disappeared within. Mitch was left panting, wet, perplexed and ever-so-slightly angry; he decided to get back inside Blue Betty as quickly as he could, but not before he noticed that where the child had gripped the handle and kicked the truck there were wet and grimy prints of remnant algae. Quickly holding it to his nose Mitch noticed that it produced the same wretched miasma as the house.
In anger he flicked the residue on the floor and clambered back into his truck.
“Fuck this,” he muttered to himself before turning the ignition and slowly reversing his truck out of the one-way street. At this stage Mitch was prepared to write-off the entire evening as some elaborate prank. He had driven far during the last few days and was riddled with a melancholic homesickness. All throughout the drive to Celú he had found his mind wandering off to simple comforts he knew only at home. His wife’s painted nails, his son’s light-up trainers, the leaves that gathered by the front gate; all these and more were the fleeting memories that had spent the endless nights chipping away at his patience and determination.
He would not make the delivery. In the moment as Mitch pressed the gas pedal down hard and reversed a little faster than he should have there was a merging of fear and frustration. The entire time he had been in Celú he had felt anxious and out-of-touch with reality; he needed to leave and go back to those comforts he dreamt of on the endless roads of France. When Mitch had finally reversed the truck around a corner and shifted into first gear he couldn’t help but notice that the roads were not as he remembered. He puzzled for a moment before looking off into the distance to see the towering dam that could act as a waypoint for his navigation. He decided he would just drive towards that beacon before beginning the slow meandering exit through Celú’s twisted elaborate roads.

An endless spire of furious cogs and throbbing pipes pumped endless vapours and toxic green emissions into the sky. There across a rolling horizon, up and over the ancient lifeless continents of pre-Cambrian Earth, lay the endless moss riddled stone bound machinery which cranked slowly across the span of hundreds of thousands of years. It called outwards in a rumbling thump that ground away in the tectonic plates. The Spire yearned for attention and life; in the ocean, like a dreaded plague, did any fish, squid or lizard that quivered past those wretched shores hurl itself against the sand in a depressed and ragged attempt to answer that fetid desire. Man did not know this but it was The Spire that dragged the fish from the sea and gave rise to the evolution of legs, and from that came the lumbering monsters of the greatest era in Earth’s history. As life formed around it in fleeting flashes of motion such was there labour for the rising tower that jutted out of its mist covered valley.

Those thunderous lizards, and soon-after the grotesque vermin, squirmed between the teeth of the great machine which sat in the centre of an enormous stone clad valley. It was metal and bone and rock and sinew and it rose up through the clouds like a mighty totem to some star-bound horror. Within the endless caverns of its interior laboured the twisted and malformed residents plucked from God knows where and when. But eventually the Earth itself got the better of it. Like skin that layers over a grotesque splinter so too did the plates of Europe crack asunder and swallow the whole damned thing.

The great vertical monstrosity was plunged like a mile-long needle deep into the crust and enclosed and forgotten. From great underground oceans, did it rip salt; from veins in the Earth did it rip iron and copper; from what little air it felt it too stole carbon. The Spire and its mysterious industry did not stop but they were, at the very least, subdued and consumed by Gaia’s might. Still, vats were filled with magma, metal was forged, and the great jagged nail that fell from space and lodged itself between mountains continued its violent and hostile activity just out of sight.

Mitch was thrown forward with a terrible momentum. He gasped furiously for breath and felt tears streaming down his cheeks. He was shaking violently and was overcome by a crippling thirst. His clothes were coated in a strange green powder that caked every fold of fabric and which puffed out in the strangest of ways like dust in the moonlight as he shuffled around and slowly woke up. His eyes were sore and his vision blurred and he felt a strange and peculiar sensation of suffocation even as he took deep heaving breaths down into his chest. Stranger still, the cab of the truck was riddled with that wretched and foul odour which choked him; in desperation Mitch leant across and wound down the window.

It was with a maddening terror and confusion that he watched water flow out from the truck and down onto the pavement below. As it slowly poured out and emptied from the cab of his truck Mitch was finally relieved of a claustrophobic panic. His mind was a throbbing blank as he glanced around behind himself and saw that the lorry from his truck had been stolen. With a nauseous quiver, Mitch reached forward and turned the ignition to Blue Betty before desperately trying to ignore the strangeness of his visit. Some part of him knew that everything was deeply wrong with the place and as he rolled across the great and terrible dam and away from the monstrous Celú he looked out towards the shimmering waters and felt almost sick at the thought of the village that had been drowned below the waves.

But he would find no reprieve across that road. Yes, the tarmac moved beneath him and the wheels turned but his mind was disconnected and his experience of time shattered. The road was long and crowded by an impenetrable and oblique forest and there were bollards that flashed past his window in a rhythmic beat while the roadside barriers slithered by at high speeds like metallic ribbon. There were no other cars nor did the road ever split or merge with another and as Mitch drove onwards he became increasingly panicked. The rising percussion of the roadside details that whooshed past his window were suffocating and the stench of the water that stained his clothes and his truck entered his lungs with each heaving breath and permeated upwards into his skull until the world throbbed in the sockets of his eyes like a headache one gets from a terrible smell.

Just as it became unbearable Mitch released his foot from the pedal and leant his head against the steering wheel. He began to cry feebly before glancing up to see he had rolled back onto the dam and was now facing the other way towards Celú. Looking towards his wing mirror he saw the road behind him. The sun was shining and it all appeared normal; the clock read 1423 but he had no clue when he tried to leave so the numbers were meaningless. It could have been minutes, seconds, or even days. He could have been sick, or cursed, or the road behind him could also have been a lie.

Confused and angry Mitch threw into reverse once more. He patted his legs and then the steering wheel. This is real, he thought. This is the real world and that road will take me home. I must be ill. I am suffering from a fever; that is all there is.

Mitch gently eased the truck backwards and began to turn in the road. As he inched the truck around the narrow path it was afforded the residents of Celú came out from their homes and stood on the glittering shores to watch him intently. Mitch noticed this and it upset him. Finally, with Blue Betty facing the right direction, he swore furiously to himself and began to focus on his wife and child as he slowly drove away. He also thought of the streets of Southampton. There in England he knew a Sikh man who ran a local corner shop. Every Sunday, when he was home, he would leave his wife to cook and go buy some cigarettes for himself and a chocolate bar for himself. The old turban-clad man was as permanent resident of his Sunday routine as his wife or child; they would nod and smile and exchange pleasantries.
He was a good man. It was a good street. It was not paved in gold; there were wrought iron fences that rusted and pigeons who used them to shit on anything below and the pavements were practically paved in flattened blackened chewing gum, but it was still a good place to live. Mitch would walk with that chocolate bar back to his house and sit there with his son and watch his favourite TV show while the smell of roast chicken and gravy would slowly fill the house. Mitch fixated on this thought and used it as a focal point to guide him away from the nightmare of Celú and his suspected poisoning.

And yet, once more, Mitch found himself being suddenly thrown forward by the braking of his truck. He was gasping for breath and the burning sun that had hung in the blue sky behind him was now replaced with a dull and listless purple sky in possession of only a few wispy smoky clouds. He eyelids were heavy and his headache had become only worse and the nausea had gotten the better of him. Mitch was still without any sense of reality but he could smell, quite clearly, the stench of vomit that had caked his clothes and chest. He looked at his clock and it read 0148.
He still wasn’t sure what it meant. But he was growing frustrated and he was visibly irritated and angry to the point of upset as he began to reverse the truck once more while swearing furiously as tears welled up in his eyes. He gripped the steering wheel until his hands hurt and his knuckles glowed white. Behind him in his wing mirror he could see a hundred people stood on the shores of Celú with handheld torches and lights. Their eyes fell on him and the anxiety it produced felt like a deliberate attempt to unsettle him. He was unwilling to relent and put his foot down once more on the pedal. This time he did not let his mind wander. This time he remained fixated on the road ahead and the details of each and every movement he had to make as the driver. Each shift in gear and gentle turning of the wheel was recorded in his mind; each bump in the road and each peculiar tree was a rigid reminder of his dogged persistence in leaving the village of Celú. As he made his way he became convinced that he was finally overcoming the strange obstacles he had been faced with.

And yet he surely must have been aware that was never really the case.
It was without warning that a small child, clad in a thick and concealing coat of a bright orange colour, ran out into the road and in front of his truck. He was going faster than he needed to be for that specific road but his feet had been guided by anxiety and distress. Mitch could not say what speed he was going at when he actually hit the child but there was a viscous spray which reached from the bottom to the top of his windshield and he barely even felt the child roll under the wheels of his truck.

Mitch slammed on the brakes and looked into his wing mirror. He immediately screamed in a thunderous rage. The child was there in a bloodied crumpled heap but behind him, by no more than ten metres, lay the dam that led to Celú. Mitch was shaking with rage and confusion as he clicked the door open and began to step down onto the road. The wretched heap of muddled flesh concealed beneath the orange parkour began to rumble and roll around. Mitch approached it carefully until he was within a distance of ten feet, and he cried out,

“What is it you want?”

Slowly the hood turned towards him and revealed a mass of knotted muscle and sinew that was wrapped around clicking gears and hissing pipes. Slowly from within the tangled knot of dripping flesh emerged rancorous spindles that stretched onwards, slowly, like the deliberate legs of a hunting spider. From the orange bundle came dozens of these needle like protrusions which dug into the road below and slowly lifted the broken child up. It clambered towards him and lowered the child to Mitch’s eye level.

“You are to return,” it said in a strange tinny, childish, voice.

“I’m trying to,” Mitch sobbed.

“You are to return to Celú,” it replied.

“No,” Mitch shook his head. “I live in England.”

“Maybe so,” the child shrugged, “but you came from Celú.”

“My wife…” he stuttered.

“Maybe so,” the child repeated, “but you came from Celú many years ago. This was not a holiday. You had a job and you completed it. Celú no longer needs deliveries. Celú will move onto the next stage. You are to return to Celú.” The child pointed towards the lake with its broken and cracked arm.

“No no no,” Mitch cried. “I have a life, and a child, and a home.”

“Maybe so,” the child said once more before tapping Mitch quietly in the chest with one of its spindly legs. Mitch began to heave violently and he clasped at his throat as he choked. “But you came from Celú, many years ago. Now,” the child raised its leg to point off towards the waters of Celú once more, “you must return. Or, you can choke to death here and Celú will recycle.”

Slowly the mechanical spider, with the limp outline of a dead child stuffed into clothing hanging between its legs, began to shuffle back towards the coastline of Celú. It motioned with one of its legs and all of the inhabitants who had intensely Mitch’s furious attempts to escape were ordered to return to work. Some wandered aimlessly back into the buildings that lay above the water but most of them began to return to the real Celú beneath the water with its sunken Tudor homes. Mitch made his choice and lay there as his tongue began to swell and his eyes dried and he faded out of existence.

Or so he hoped.

Suddenly Mitch was thrown forward. He took a deep and clear breath. He looked around. The streets of Celú were hanging over him. The mottled green water obscured the sky above him. The cobblestone roads had been covered with a rank and feral growth and in the distance was a glow. He looked down at his hands before touching his face and he began to walk forwards through the riddled streets of the great and terrible Celú. It was not long before he saw another brittle soul. Their eyes were sunken grey and laboured beneath a low hanging brow. Their walk was slow and lumbering but there was a deliberateness to their gait.

Finally Mitch emerged on the edge of the town surrounded by hundreds of twisted shapes. He glanced over to them and saw that many were far from having ever been human but he paid them little attention. Off in the distance was a tremendous gorge; it was clearly an artificial crack in the Earth that had been drilled in the lake bed for it was a great stepped valley that lowered further into the soil and rock and crust than any other place on Earth. It was dark and terrible to look down into that abyss but from it emerged great and heavy chains. And far away on either side of the gorge’s walls, near the edge of the first steep cliff face Mitch could see thousands of distant figures heaving on the links of each chain that were no smaller than a car.

And just poking out from the depths of that inky black water was the tip of a great and jagged needle.

Mitch had not lied, nor was he delusional. He did in fact have a wife and son. They were informed, with some great sadness, that their loved one’s vehicle had been found wrecked and abandoned in the mountains of the Alsace. No one could say for sure what had happened to the driver--their beloved--but the police were sure that the truck had been submerged under water for some time. They asked Mrs.Webb--Mitchell’s wife--if she were at all aware that Mitch’s records of employment had been falsified, but she was unaware of any foul play.

It was just that the police were awfully confused as to why a self-employed man had felt the need to slowly, but deliberately, deliver thousands and thousands of pounds of sugar and fertiliser to a sleepy village called Celú. Mrs.Webb could only shudder at the mention of the name although she knew not why. She asked the police if this was really the best of use their time given the recent civil unrest in mainland Europe but the police reassured her it was important since a nearby dam had been devastated by a recent series of explosions. They would later confiscate all of Mitch’s belongings under concerns of terrorism.

Meanwhile Mitch continued to labour for the bountiful God of the Jagged Nail and The Eternal Engine. He did not know sleep, nor much else for that matter. But as time went on he slowly became thankful for two things. First, that his great and benevolent Lord had granted him time above the waters so that he might live as a real man and not just as a dreamt outline of a man. And second, that it would not be long before it called out once more like it had millions of years before to ocean life, and soon all men would find themselves in its service. From that day on he would be reunited with his wife and child even if only as fragments of The Great and Terrible Jagged Nail.