Her Mechanical Heart

The noise churned from the subterranean depths—a low, agonized groan as of dying machinery. Something like a grind of melancholy gears, steel bones on wearied bellows: a clockwork heart attack.

The Woman rose.

She was old in the way of damask curtains, the color bleached and powdery, with the strength of wilting threads. Her face was an oak tree, gnarled to antiquity, crevassed beyond repair; her eyes were convex slate; her mouth, the slim aperture to an abyss. She was living dust.

Slowly, with bent back, the Woman hobbled across the room, her toes crackling like the last remnants of popcorn over a wintry fire. She limped through the basement door, down the darkened steps. She thought nothing, and made no sound.

There was void.

And beyond lay the furnace, a glowing ember in the non-light, bound by palls of detritus and the corpses of spiders. It was from this ironclad mass that the pitiful noise emanated, though growing fainter with each step that she took.

She paused, passive.

Creakingly, the Woman extended her fingers to feel about amongst the rods and wires and esoteric bits of scrap casking the metallic beast. There was no purpose in her movements, no hope that they should succeed in eliminating the noise, merely the blind gropings of a pale animal; a pig rooting for truffles in a wood without.

Then she stopped.

And withdrew her hand, clutching something small and red and slowly pulsing. The barest hint of confusion knotted her brow, only to be effaced by senility. The Woman accepted it as she accepted time and space and the clanking world about her—as she would soon accept her own death.

The two-chambered little box continued to throb, though now quite irregularly, and softer than the patter of rain on fresh-tilled soil. And the ember-glow of the furnace began to retreat in upon itself, little impish coils lapping at the innards of a vast metallic carcass.

So it was that the last Woman watched the industrial pulse of the world beat out, while all about her the gears of the Earth ground to a shuddering halt, for she had long since forgotten what she was the Keeper of. But it did not matter. Nothing mattered.

For there was nothing left to matter, and no one to care. There was only a scrap of dying tin in a crinkled palm.