The Clockmaker's Bride

<p><em><strong>Do you ever feel the rhythmic thrumming in the walls and wonder if it's the house breathing or merely your own heart counting down the seconds until it stops?</strong></em></p><p>In the suffocating oil-slicked gloom of Vane Manor the air is heavy with the scent of ozone and the copper tang of an open vein. Julian Vane a man driven mad by the silence of the grave has spent years constructing a masterpiece that blurs the line between divine creation and industrial blasphemy. He is building a bride-not of flesh but of hissing valves silver pistons and an intricate nervous system made of electrified wire. But a machine of this magnitude requires more than just a winding key to wake it; it requires the kinetic energy of the living and the raw screaming essence of the human spirit to lubricate its gears.</p><p>The horror begins when the heavy iron doors of the manor hiss shut trapping a collection of high-society revelers in a labyrinth that is constantly shifting like the internal tumblers of a massive lock. As the masquerade commences the guests realize with mounting dread that the ballroom floor is a giant pressure plate and the walls are lined with surgical precision. One by one they are claimed by the Bride a towering figure of porcelain and velvet who harvested their limbs to replace her own brass appendages. You will watch in paralyzed fascination as the story peels back the skin of reality to show you the gears beneath documenting every wet snip of the needle and every agonizing click of the socket.</p><p>There is a specific kind of terror that comes from realizing your body is nothing more than a collection of parts waiting to be harvested by a logic that does not know the meaning of mercy. Every chapter of this requiem is a tightening of the vise a slow-motion descent into a labyrinth where the hallways shift like the teeth of a saw and the shadows have weight. If you turn away now you will always wonder what was behind that final heavy iron door-and you will feel the phantom itch of a needle you cannot see threading its way through your nerves while you sleep.</p><p><em><strong>If you were to look deep inside the clockwork of your own soul would you find a spirit or just a series of gears waiting for a master to wind them?</strong></em></p>