the Homonculus

By Tyler Sherman

Work was lame, and there was nothing anyone could do about it. The factory was practically something out of the industrial revolution. Nobody was chained to the machinery, but they looked like they were. Everywhere she tuned she saw gaunt white faces, pallid with deep shadows being carved into their skin, practically pulled tight over the cheekbones. The lights, over her workstation were a particularly inexpensive brand of fluorescent bulb that flickered every once and a while, and cast a creepy greenish hue over everything, and lit up the sea-green painted concrete floor. She could remember it was a big deal when someone on the night shift found the crappy bulbs online, and printed out the product description, which said the bulbs where a nickel cheaper than the name-brand. There was some talk about a workers revolt, but nothing serious.
She kept pushing the dolly down the ally behind the two rows of assembly lines, and because the machines made a more or less symmetrical, and attractive, she supposed, arrangment they’d decided to have a big window where tours could look in, and as a result the floor was shinny grey linoleum with traction spots, and had bright white lights overhead. It was like walking the gauntlet, which was lit in such a way that discouraged a gaunt look, because there was no place for shadows to collect.
When she passed the tour window she let of the cart she was pushing, which careened down the darker aisle until it was overwhelmed by entropy and just stopped by itself. Some of the less pallid people looked when a box of left legs fell of the hand cart and on to the floor, bursting open, a few pink knees popping into joint and flailing across the concrete floor. Sarah thought she heard someone shriek farther down the aisle, in the dark.
Sarah could tell that people were feeling animosity toward her, even though they couldn't be bothered to make a grimace, or a disgusted face. She could see, barely, the light, and sign for the break room in the foggy distance. As she made her way a dense fog rolled in. The factory was huge, it stretched to a vanishing point in almost all directions. There was lots of space for things like weather, and birds to get traction, and build momentum. It wasn't uncommon for a light shower to spark up in the late afternoon in the summertime, or for a rouge fog like this or roll in, on dark cold days like this.
The break room became more, and more visible as she walked toward it, the fog, also, continued to thicken, and everything else was fading into blurry darkness. On the horizon behind her, humanoid silhouettes floated around machines, and it wasn't clear what they were doing, or whether or not they were intelligent at all, there was no way to know if they were moral, or if they shared our values, so for all intents and purposes, the didn't exist, or they did but we didn't have anything to do with it.
The inside of the break room was lined with lockers, there was a folding table, and chairs in the center of the room, and there was a coffee urn that was almost always full of cold coffee. Sarah’s locker was by the corner, near a small, grimy, barred window of shatterproof glass, with criss-crossing security wire running through it. The locker creaked as she opened it, and there really wasn't much inside but her book, whose white cover had faded to a dull grayish brown. The cover page had been completely torn off when she first saw it. As she leafed through the pages, which were dog eared, and worn, she heard the intensity of the shrieking outside, on the factory floor raise an octave, and reach a new peak of intensity.
The section of the book titled "Homonculi" was almost unintegible, the page was so worn it was starting to come apart, fuzzy wood pulp raised from the page, light shone through it, it was so thin. The margins were clogged with notes.
An appropriate mandrake was nearly impossible to come by, which Sarah had noted in the margin. With a heavy heart she had made the decision to forego the perfect mandrake for bits of mandrake. The blood, semen, and bones she already had. She didn't have little cloth bags, and she was initially averse to using zip-locs until she read an account of a successful homonculus grown in a bag in manure in just thirty days. Thirty days was fine by her.
She leafed through the rest of the book idly. The factory outside had gotten darker, and in a place that could become dangerous at night, (and often did) one took breaks frequently, and seriously. On the other hand, people rarely noticed her or anyone from the line, as long as they weren't in front of a tour group. Some dolls could go uninspected if they really wanted to.
The book of course had extensive sections on the philosopher's stone, and transmutation, and the elixir of life, which they (confusingly in her opinion) titled Everclear. There were terrible alchemical symbols and star charts. The whole thing had a dedication from Ernst Hackle, there were notes on Cthulu, and Zoroastrianism, and masonry. A pyramid in a circle played a prominent role on the last page.

Her carport didn't smell nicely, but in the winter people didn't stay outside longer than they had too. Sarah was counting on this, because bags of blood and semen, gestating in horse manure wouldn't smell nice. She had blood, Human blood, she didn't know how much, a cooler full, enough for a while at least. She'd have to get some more before the month was over.
The bags, she'd already named. There were three in total, one of them, even had a bit of rhinoceros skin, with some hair still attached. One had a few pieces of mandrake inside, though they were hard to come by, and not of the highest quality. The apothecary only had one mason jar of cut up mandrake and it was all dried out, and cracking on the edges. the final bag was almost all blood and semen, there was a sliver of mandrake, and a few hairs of rhino. Sarah was being cautious; she wanted to cover all her bases. She wanted results.
There car port was, as she knew it would be, freezing. Her hands, like most didn't work superbly when they were this cold. She was going to wear gloves, she even bought some, some yellow kitchen gloves, and some clear latex gloves, but nothing felt nice. It was too cold, she figured it wouldn't take that long. She'd bury the Homonculi, and go inside and wash her hands.
Unfortunately when she got down there it wasn't as easy as she had hoped it would have been. The row of horse manure was arranged just the way it should be. The runes were places around the room, and she had a large glass carafe full of blood in the mini fridge, but the manure was also frozen solid. There wasn't anything Sarah could do but break up the huge piece into smaller pieces, and thaw them.
Sarah went about breaking up the manure with a shovel, and brining it into the house on baking sheets. She set the baking sheets down on the counter, that was still slick with blood and juice from the mandrake root, and she preheated the oven. She picked bits of skin out from under her fingernails, and she put the manure in a two hundred degree oven. She did this a few times, almost slipping, once on a pile of vomit, and semen, in the hallway between the carport door and the kitchen. Once the manure was back to a pliable state she brought it all back out into the carport and reformed the row. Thick and short the row was supposed to give as much manure to each of the three homonculi and share the heat. She buried each bloody packet under the manure, and covered it with a mount of the excrement. The carafe was next as she poured a healthy dose of blood into the manure over each homonculi fetuses.
Almost as soon as she covered the last homonculus in blood the manure refroze. Some of the blood froze, itself, before it could soak into the manure, and it left a blood stain dripping down the manure almost black it was so dark. She wanted to scrape off some of the gore that had accumulated on her hands, which meant she had to go outside. She threw the door of the carport open, and was confronted by the black expanse of cold that was her driveway, and alley. As she stepped outside, the door seemed to slam behind her, and dogs, somewhere, close, could be heard barking, and mewling, and maybe making gurgly sounds. The sky, though so dark its almost black had a definite green tinge, a definite rancid meat smell was coming from somewhere. Her carport had so many smells on it by now. Her booted feet made resonant announcements every time she stepped, and malice could be heard, ringing from the mountains. The sky, suddenly was alive with thunder, clapping from one side of the sky to the other, and when Sarah got to the garbage cans near the alley, she was almost struck down by the smell of rotting flesh. There were corpses around, she was sure. The lid of the garbage can was heavy, and clattered to the ground when Sarah pushed it off the top. She wrung her hands out over the garbage, and bits flew away, and her hands were dripping with blood. She gave each hand a shake, and then a whip like motion, pointed out, over the grass, and then she was back inside, the door closed safely behind her.
As Sarah made her way back inside, she noticed that the manure was cracked in one place, right over the first Homonculus, closest to the door. The manure, she noted, was still frozen, it had cracked in two places, it appeared, where something behind it was pushing up.

The night was quiet, as Sarah came back into the house. The homonculi were nearly full grown, as far as she could tell. They were almost a full twelve inches. That’s what she was worried about, that they had seemed to stop growing. Maybe, she thought, they had stopped growing. Maybe they were maturing, awaiting their 'birth'.
As she got undressed and ready for bed, she was washing her face, and brushing her teeth in the bathroom, and she caught a glint of something flitting past the darkened door, leading out into her bedroom. There wasn't any light on in her bedroom, so as she looked out everything was a shade of black, but she could definitely see something moving around in her room. There was no way it could be one of the Homonculi this soon. They mave have stopped growing, but they definitely weren't prepared to be ‘born’ yet. She would be sufficiently terrified if she were to make it out of the bathroom only to be confronted with three twelve inch tall false-humans. They had work to do, obviously, but Sarah was actually terrified by the idea of being in their presence. She could deal with the blood stained kitchen, and living room carpet, and the smell of rotting flesh she had gotten used to. The idea of being around them, as they're walking around? They were made of chicken bones.
She had no idea what to do; she was literally frozen in space, and could not move. She was at an impasse, what to do, and couldn't think. Just then, one of the shapes, she couldn't tell what shape it was, came up and was flaring there for a while, right in front of the door, but far back enough that it was completely hidden by shadow. That was when the shrieking started at her house. Screams coming from all directions. She was shocked by them, as much as she was the first time. She jerked away from the shape in the shadows, to the window, and she looked outside, to see what, if anything could be making that sound, it sounded like it was coming from outside somewhere. What was she going to do about it if she found something? She couldn't leave the bathroom.
The thing in the shadows disappeared, and as Sarah walked back into her room the lights flickered, and then dimmed to a dark yellow that reduced everything to two tones, dark yellow, and black. She made her way to the light switch by the door, and flipped it, and as soon as she did, the lights in the room flickered, and one of the light bulbs in her lamp exploded as the room alit. She was happy to see that nothing had changed, but she felt like she needed to check the manure just to be sure.
Sarah put on her housecoat, and made her way back out to the carport. When she got there she was confronted by the manure, with three big fissures to empty spaces, evenly spaced in the manure. There were manure shards all over the carport, sticking from the walls, imbedded in the walls and ceiling. She could hear things in her house, behind her, and she didn’t want to go back inside, but she stood there, for a few minutes, swearing to herself, inspecting the shards of manure protruding from the carport wall, and regained her composure. These were her Homonculi, and even though she wasn’t ready, and the thought of them still really skeazed her out, she could handle this. The Homonculi would follow her command, she really could handle this.
She made her way back into the house, slowly, carefully. The piles of flesh, and organs piled up by the door were slowly rotting, the smell of rotting skin was everywhere. She was frightened for a moment, by the ramifications of the manslaughter. People had to die. What was she going to do.
The homunculi were nowhere to be seen in the kitchen. They could be hiding somewhere, she thought.
“Oh god.” She gasped as she realized that they might be the rotting piles of flesh, the idea of a miscarriage, or birth defects hadn’t even occurred to her. Maybe one of her homunculi died in the manure, suffocated maybe, and hadn’t actually been alive.

The Homonculi had been, more or less, agreeable, and not nearly as terrifying as Sarah thought they were going to be. The were ‘born’ speaking English, which was a hard thing to get her head around. Whats more they each started talking with each other, using names that she hadn’t given them. It was almost as though they knew each other from way back, and they were just getting together again.
One Homunculus, who the other two were calling Melchior, produced, from where she had no idea, a glorious looking opium pipe, gilded with bronze, and translucent beads that could have been colored glass, or semi-precious stones, and preceded to close himself in the bathroom, which began to exude a strong sweet smell, and smoke was coming out from under the bathroom door every once and a while. The other two were simply sitting on the floor in the kitchen talking to each other in slow protracted voices, communicating purposefully, and intentionally, though they clearly weren’t speaking English now, or at least not any type of English she could understand. They didn’t seem to notice the body parts still lying on the floor.
She’d gave them their instructions, and sat down and explained to them ehere exactly they were to go, and how they would get there. They seemed to understand her, and seemed eager, maybe, to do what she asked, but they didn’t leave the house, the seemed in fact to be making themselves more comfortable, like they were settling in for a long cold winter. The two homunculi sitting in the kitchen, as Sarah watched, dumbfounded, their faces grew pained, and their voices, thought not speeding up any had definitely raised in pitch. Bubbling sounds came from the bathroom, and Sarah imagined “Melchior” drowning in the tub, or in the sink or toilet, or drowning on his own vomit, or something else, and she didn’t really seem to mind.

The house was quiet, as Sarah sat in the living room. She was sweaty, and tired, and her muscles ached, as though she’d just run a marathon. The aggression had been short, and exhausting, but the Homonculi were well on their way to wherever they were going, as she wasn’t sure they would actually do what she asked. She looked around the room, which was connected to the kitchen, and the hallway that lead in one direction to the front door, and in the other direction to the carport. There was gore everywhere, she had just noticed. The past few months had been so busy, back and forth to work, all the procurement that goes along with this sort of alchemical process. She was just beat, she’d clean it up later, or if she still had some good will with the Homonculi whenever the got back, if they got back, maybe they’d help her. Then she would turn them loose. They could shake hands, and part ways amiably. The house didn’t smell like death anymore, she realized. It had gone past rancid, and other smells of purification. The whole house, now, smelled, sweet. Cloyingly sweet. She wasn’t sure how that was possible, until she remembered the opium that Melchior was smoking in the bathroom.
She got up, and made for the bathroom, where she found the small opium pipe. When she reached for it she realized that it was smaller that she thought. The Homunculi were small, usually no more than a foot or so, and Melchior, wasn’t even that tall. They all in fact looked sickly or inconsequential some how. The pipe however, was long. The little homunculus must have to have held it out at arms length to fit the end in his mouth. She flipped open the censer which was stamped with a pomegranate blossom, and two swords, to see that there wasn’t any thing in it but ash. There was however a small teak case on the floor, just poking out from under the vanity, with a poppy flower inlayed into the cover in brass.

She was bleary, there was no doubt about that. The small case could fit much more opium that she would have expected, and she smoked it until her lungs were screaming, and her throat was burning. She used more than one book of matches, and burned her fingers a lot, and it was generally a bad experience. The bathroom she noticed wasn’t as dirty as the rest of the house, and in fact, the only signs of death that touched the bathroom were a few bloody footprints, coming into and going out of the shower, and her overwhelming sense of doom. She didn’t feel degraded, laying prostrate on the bathroom floor, she wasn’t in any blood, though she could see farther under the vanity now, and there was a lot of dust and hair, and a cotton swab soaked with something, she felt vindicated. She’d assumed a divine role in the creation of the false-humans, and she had three creatures to do her bidding, albeit socially unconscious creatures. As she lay face down, she felt, proud.
That was when the homunculus came back, though, in her diminshed state she couldn't have known it until Melchior came into the bathroom. He towered over her face, starting down into her bleary eyes. His hands weren't covered in blood, and that worried Sarah, but soon her mind ran away from the thought, not because it was troublesome, but because the opium made it hard to focus on anything, least of all minutae and troublesome things.
There were any number of things that would have been approperaite to kill Sarah with. The aperatus that ran the sand-bath was very rickety, he could have set the house on fire with it, almost without thinking. There were alembics piled in the living room, and she had a terrible looking retort on the kitchen table, just outside the bathroom. Her anathor was heavy, in addition to being loaded with coal, and possibly, still burning. She had any number of sacrifical blades, some of which were still in the carport, where she had dropped them in excitment after carving runes in all the walls, and on the floor. The shards of manure, also in the garage, could have been used as a weapon, if they hadn't melted.

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