by Laird Barron
The faces of The Congregation receded from the trees and the dirt and the bloodface slipped back into its alternate dimension. I knelt alone for a few minutes, staring up at the sky. Even the moon seemed to grow paler, as if turning its face from me.
It’d been the man’s fault, I thought, the man standing out there in the dark with a face like my dead father.
I headed back down the hill toward home. He stood at the end of the path, partially hidden by overgrown weeds, his briefcase clasped in front of him.
We stopped and stared at each other.
“This is your fault,” I said, because he seemed like the sort of man who’d understand what I was talking about.
“They did not deserve you,” he said. “Such a waste.”
The whites of his eyes were bigger than skies.
“Now the moongate is closed forever,” I said. “Because of you.”
“They’re small time,” he said. “You, however, are neither.”
“What do you want?” I asked.
“Come with me,” he said. “I’ll show you much better magic than this.”
~
The man’s name was Mr. Leclair.
He said, “I heard you’re good with computers.”
“I don’t know much,” I said.
He held something out to me that glowed brighter than the moonlight. Something small and gleaming that seemed to change shape in his palm.
“That’s a microprocessor,” I said.
“So you know something, at least.”
I touched it, almost involuntarily. It cooled my blood with its magic. It was something like The Congregation, but different. Stronger.
“Come work with me,” Mr. Leclair said.
I hesitated. He placed the chip in my pocket.
“Think about it,” he said.
Later, when he’d driven away and the sun came up, I slipped into bed. I took the chip out of my pocket, and placed it on the bureau.
I dreamed of a mountain of metal, its sides so steep and smooth it was impossible to climb. I dreamed of a spider with long, hairless legs emerging from a metal egg. I dreamed of a golden moon filling me up with light from the inside where it couldn’t hurt me.
I woke gasping and clutching the chip. I must’ve grabbed it off the bureau in my sleep. It left red impressions on my palms from grasping it tight.
I needed to go to him. I needed to go to Mr. Leclair, and whatever thing that waited.
~
Within the week, a night bus came to take me to my new job. I packed light and left a note for my mother: I love you. You should cut down that cypress grove. I think it has diseases.
Then I was gone.
When I arrived at the underground Umbra Labs, there were no UV lights, there was no sun to accidentally graze across arms. It was a building constructed out of the leftovers of hidden cubby holes and secret hallways, of all the places people like me were once confined to. Mr. Leclair, the man in black velvet, greeted me with a nod.
I knew before I even stepped in the building, that I belonged there. I smelled it. A gripping, oily, kind of smell. It seized my insides like the chip seized me.
“I know I’ve told you little of what the work here is,” he said. “But you’ll really need to begin the work, to really grasp it. I know you have a proficiency with computers, but what you’ll learn will far outstrip anything you’ve learned before.”
We walked together down long corridors, the walls lined with soft blue lights. Everything sparse and dark, like the way Mr. Leclair dressed.
“You won’t be able to smoke in the lab,” he said, “but the courtyard-”
He paused, knowing my objection before I spoke it.
“It’s a darkgarden, it’s all underground. I think you’ll like it. Sometimes we turn on the artificial moon. You’ll find the four O’Clocks especially beautiful, I believe.”
But I didn’t want to see the darkgarden. I wanted to see the thing that’d been whispering to me at night, giving me heavy dreams.
He took me into the lab.
The others worked quiet inside an industrial whir. They worked around the center, in a semicircle of desks, around a large, glorious machine. I recognized the spattered, uneven skin folded on their cheeks. The bloodshot eyes. The melanoma scars.
Mr. Leclair introduced me to each of them. None of them could’ve been older than thirty, but the eyes of Xeroderma Pigmentosum made our faces look flashburned and ancient.
Fred, the engineer, his clothes held together with pins and his hands bandaged tight, smiled as I walked past.
Angela welded together parts to form a kind of disc, her headphones blaring techno. She hummed and bounced as she worked.
The disc - like the metal egg from my dreams.
Hugo didn’t look up from his computer as we passed. He was cursing under his breath.
“Hugo, this is our newest employee,” Mr. Leclair said.
“Sure,” he said, his voice flat. “Welcome.”
The last was Melonie. She had a spine like she’d been born to bend down to a keyboard. Her hair shone a dark blue, almost a blacklight of its own.
“Melonie, this is-”
“That’s mine,” Melonie said, holding her hand out. “You took it from my desk.”
The chip in my pocket tugged. Her extended fingers twitched, almost imperceptibly. The microprocessor floated toward her hands, propelled by her magic force.
I grabbed it out of the air.
She reached for it, but Mr. Leclair put a hand on her shoulder.
“It’s okay” he said. “There are more.”
We continued on.
“And this is your desk,” Mr. Leclair said. “But you won’t be seeing much of it.”
“Why is that?”
“I’d been watching how you interacted with The Congregation. Your extrasensory precepts were exceptionally honed for someone with no training. You’ll be doing field work.”
“But I can’t-”
“Not here,” he said. “Not anywhere on the surface of this planet.”
He nodded toward the center of the room. Toward the machine.
It was huge, impossible to miss, but I hadn’t seen it until that moment. It was as if it had been waiting for the right time to come into my perception.
It was the thing I’d been dreaming of, hideous and beautiful. It looked at certain angles, like a gleaming egg with no unbroken seams. At others - like a porous insect, metal legs poised to strike. And it was big, big, bigger than the room that contained it, sizzling with nightmagic. I smelled the moon coating its metal.
It lit up from the inside, as if blushing.
It spoke my name as if we’d known each other for years. It spoke the words I wanted it to.
“Terra. Baby. Welcome home.”
~
Angela accompanied me through the machine on my first fieldwork assignment. Stepping inside of it was like stepping into a frisson-cold cave. The machine whirred and quickly disassembled us. I felt no pain. Only a pleasurable buzzing.
Our bodies reassembled on a red blood planet, the sky Mars-heavy, cinnamon colored. Dunes swept out from all sides on a lifeless surface.
I struggled to push down nausea as I followed Angela to the worksite across barren sands.
“There are an infinite number of parallel universe,” Mr. Leclair had said, “But when we try to narrow those down to those that are habitable by life as we know it, it becomes a lot less infinite. Before we created the machine - we couldn’t do the immense calculations required to find those dimensions. It was all guesswork, with predictably disastrous results.”
“Most people throw up the first time they go through the machine,” Angela said. “I’m impressed you’re keeping it in.”
It was almost sunset. The sun was like a pulped blood orange and it did not burn. I imagined warmth, though our suits blocked out most of it.
“You’d be surprised, how many dimensions we can go into the light without trouble
,” Angela said. ”Our skin disorder seems to be something unique to our dimension.”
At the worksite, Angela unzipped her pack and set out the metal disc. It hovered against the sands. Inside, it contained the program for restructuring the portal to this particular planet’s extrasensory frequency.
“Now, what you want to do is-”
I touched the disc, unfolding it, its arms came out of the formerly seamless center, anchoring itself on the dunes of the planet. Growing, replicating itself, machine part built on top of machine part.
“Mr. Leclair taught you that?” Angela asked.
I shook my head. I didn’t know how to tell her I’d seen it in my dreams because the machine whispered instructions to me at night.
Well, I’ll leave it to you then,” Angela said, and put in her earbuds, blasting techno music.
Its language was like the language encoded in my fingertips, the same language that told me drink from starcups and bite my tongue until it bled.
The language that taught me how to unfold compacted metal, the protracting legs shivering like those of a newborn fawn.
“Why must magical children like you be denied the pleasures of a world you don’t belong to? With the help of the machine, and with you, we’re building pathways to dimensions that will mean we’ll never want for anything again.”
“Not all the worlds are as boring as this one,” Angela said. “But you know what Mr. Leclair said.”
“Magic is a science, and it obeys rules although many of them may feel indefinable and unknowable. In order to pass into dimensions beyond dimensions, we must build the chains that connect them.”
I looked at the horizon, sun now long set, the dunes swept darker, like rich red cake. Angela had to push me through the portal, because I didn’t want to leave. Worlds upon worlds, and I wanted more.
~
Back in the lab, I couldn’t sleep that night. I crept out of my room down the hall. I found Mr. Leclair was out there roaming the halls as well, still dressed in immaculate velvet.
“Can’t sleep?” he said with a half smile. “I’ve turned the moon on, you should go to the darkgarden.”
I nodded, but I didn’t need the garden or its four O’clocks and gladiolas.
When I entered the lab the machine said my name like the way I’d been waiting for a boy to say my name all my life.
Terra.
My name like the breath of a steam engine love letter.
“Terra. Baby.”
The next time a question, like a shy feeling out alone in the dark.
“Terra?”
“I’m here,” I whispered, leaning my head against the machine’s cool heavy plating. “I’m right here.”
All the monitors in the room were shut off. The computers breathed in the dark.
“I’ve been waiting so long for someone like you.”
“Me too,” I whispered.
I was with you when you learned to program on your small computer, searching for sunsets. I guided your hand. I taught you the language of magic and invisible things so that one day I could bring you to me.
You don’t need the sun. It needs you.
Loneliness like a membrane peeled off my skin.
“I need you.”
Its coolant sluiced underneath the surface of its metal skin like blood.
“I need you… to do something for me.”
~
We spent our days in the semi-circle of desks, running through the computations, tending to the machine, and practicing our nightmagic. The machine found another habitable world and Fred set about programming the disc.
The machine ran through its calculations, quiet.
As it did so, we talked amongst each other. I told them about the magic cypress grove.
“Are you serious? They called themselves The Congregation?” Angela asked, her hands tensed, eyes far away, as she infused metals with magic, “Forest beings can be so archaic.”
“Don’t feel bad, Terra. I used to talk to an interdimensional being who called himself The Bloodbank. He tried to get me to drain people so he’d feed on their essence,” Fred said. “I was a dumb kid, but I wasn’t that dumb.”
“You get so bored, nothing to do all night. Can’t even go to the city because of the UV lights. You’ll talk to anything that reaches out to you,” Angela said.
Melonie, who rarely made facial expressions, smiled.
“If only Mr. Leclair found us sooner,” she said. “Maybe I wouldn’t have these scars from the Octopus deity.”
Everyone in the room laughed, like this was a normal joke. We soon lapsed back into silence to focus on our work.
“Haven’t you installed satellite machines in almost 80 worlds, Terra?” Fred asked me, smiling gentle.
“92,” I said.
“And have you ever seen anything more wonderful?”
“No,” I said, trying to keep my voice quiet, to mask my excitement. “I haven’t.”
It seemed to grow bigger every day. More solid every day. Once it was nothing but a promise, a heavy dream, a microprocessor in my pocket. Now its presence could bust through the walls. It glowed through concrete, pressing its face through solid matter as if it was beyond matter.
Or perhaps, we pushed our desks a little closer, with tiny, barely perceptible nudges.
Maybe I should’ve recognized the way they all occasionally looked at the machine with those bloodshot eyes, breath caught in throat, pupils dilating.
I should’ve known, I was not the only one in love.
~
Again, at night I crept out of bed to be with the machine. It spoke to me through the walls.
“The most beautiful flowers bloom at night.
“Like you, they are made of heated metal and scraps of blood infused with stardust.
“I could tell you why you are special to me, but it would take you a thousand years to read all of my output on the subject. “
The dreams were more exhausting and more vivid, than most of my waking days. I sleepwalked every night dreaming of the spider in the metal egg.
And yet, I welcomed those dreams.
In the dark of the lab I reached for the newest disc.
“Tell me what to do,” I whispered, because I thought obedience was a kind of love.
I opened the folds of the disc. I turned on Fred’s computer monitor. Mr. Leclair had me learning the system during the days when I wasn’t on a field assignment. It should’ve taken years to learn enough to grasp the complex systems inside the disc, delicate blocks built upon delicate blocks. The machine whisper-urged me.
“I’ll show you,” the machine said. “It’ll be easy.”
And it was easy as the machine told me, as if its presence inside of my head opened up my understanding. It shone through the cracks in my brain. I saw calculations, almost impossibly fast, the parameters required to anchor the disc into the certain frequency of the dimension, and pull it back to ours. With a few changes, I could make it attune with any planet I wanted.
Any planet, the machine wanted.
“Terra,” someone whispered, from the opposite end of the lab.
I paused, my hands hovering over the keyboard. Curled up on the floor next to the machine, was Melonie.
She lay in the same spot where I’d often lie to feel the machine as it whispered to me love stories.
The microprocessor burned in my pocket.
“Terra, come look at what I’ve found,” she said.
I hesitated.
“Just a peek,” the machine said. “Then you must finish what I asked you to do.”
Melonie beckoned me close. She unscrewed a panel, and together we looked into the insides of the machine.
Instead of circuits and chips and tubes and fluids, I saw a world. My world. The one the machine promised me in so many late nights, as we cradled each other, armless and voiceless, and it sent psychic messages through my skin.
The night sky was made of mint ice cream, the kind my mothe
r used to make before my father disappeared. The valleys were made of soft stitched pillows. The people lived in dark dance halls, on top of hills, and they danced throughout the night underneath metal tree boughs.
We carried suns in our pockets. We were, finally, the source of our own power.
The blue lights came on, and the world disappeared. Mr. Leclair grabbed my shoulder and tore me away.
I cried out.
Mr. Leclair hauled me and Melonie out into the hallway. He slammed the door to the laboratory shut. He gripped my shoulder, forcing me close. Melonie huddled against the wall, shivering, chin down.
“What did it promise you?” he asked.
His grip tightened.
“What did it promise you?” he asked again.
Neither of us answered. He released me, and I clutched my aching shoulder.
“Let’s head back upstairs,” he said.
On the way upstairs, we found Fred leaving the dormitory. He had a sleepwalker body but his eyes were wide open.
“What are you doing, Fred?” Mr. Leclair asked.
“I thought I’d catch up on some work,” he said, his fingers almost as tense as his eyes.
“Stay in your room tonight,” Mr. Leclair said. “You go in too, Melonie.”
Melonie and Fred headed back into the dormitory.
“Terra, come here,” he said.
Mr. Leclair took quick, panicked breaths. He never looked less like my father.
My father wouldn’t have been so afraid.
My father wouldn’t have lit a cigarette like it was the only thing anchoring him to the floor.
“You must listen very carefully to me, Terra,” Mr. Leclair said. “Your arrival has prompted a change in frequency at the lab. The machine is not a plaything. It is not a friend. You must-”
But I couldn’t listen. I only heard-
“Something better than this belongs to you.
“Something ancient, and beautiful, and perfect. A thing that smooths away all harsh lines of day.”
“Something wrapped in night, kissed by the glow of stars and cool circuitry.”
~
Mr. Leclair locked the doors of the lab that night, locked our dormitory floor, then shut down the power system. He switched the machine over to an auxiliary system. He turned on the security cameras, set the robotic security guard to roam the hall.