An Atmosphere Of Angels

by H C Turk

  Parno followed, and both stood nude. They had not looked to each other since the meal. Despite their mutual response, they did not seem to notice each other now.

  Parno scratched at Kathlynn’s back hard enough to draw blood.

  “I could never get my nails dull. Dull.”

  Without even a wince, Kathlynn turned, grabbed Parno’s upper arm with both hands, and stretched her neck where she could bite his ear.

  His lobe dropped to the floor. There, alien absorbency cleansed the perversion.

  Parno and Kathlynn both licked their fingers. Both tasted blood.

  “Aaaaaaa,” Parno sounded again, not shouting, not singing, but bleating like an animal, ending with a human word. “Stupiddddddddd.”

  Kathlynn poked her finger against his eyeball.

  “I cannot see that you hear,” she said with no emotion.

  His eye watered, and Parno lowered himself to his knees. He had pressed two fingers against Kathlynn’s vaginal entry when she began convulsing.

  Behind them, the chamber door opened. Not for an entry, but an exit.

  Kathlynn lay twitching on the floor, eyes rolled back, as Parno made to mount her sexually, though his phallus remained flaccid. She reached for his nose, but could no longer reach. Parno made to penetrate Kathlynn, but could no longer support himself.

  Beneath the Earthers, the alien floor began flowing. Not absorbing the remnants of a meal, the floor removed the distressed occupants. The system slid Parno and Kathlynn onto the ribbon conveyor, which delivered them to another chamber.

  Neither human considered this experience a pleasant ride. As though rachitic in their bowels, both people twitched convulsively, ill puppets fed inputs by an incompetent master.

  Unable to see, Kathlynn received no distress from the bright chamber’s dark ends. Not the artwork of a master depicting the night sky, the indistinct ends suggested smoke; not a carboniferous mist carried by cleansing flame, but the dregs of burnt flesh, the depthless destruction of ashes.

  Chapter 9

  Peaceful Passage

  Though only a neural notater of damage, pain impresses even aliens as being more concrete than mere information. Emotion, that opinionated indicator of non-cognitive nature in human life, affects value judgments in people while being no more than impression, measuring correctness as feeling, not philosophy. Despite being driven by human physicality, both of these substantial intangibles gather in the brain, a collator that quashes meaning when numb. When mental dullness results from existential exhaustion rather than tissue damage, external danger can threaten dreariness and strike clarity into painless, unfeeling emotion.

  In a state of drab semi-consciousness, Parno felt no pain, no anxiety, until monsters attacked. Metallic tentacles curled upward from the planet’s depths to press against his head. Moist as though drooling acidic blood, devilish wings swathed his body. Heinous machinations glowed like the teeth of demons, jaws stretched to bite into Parno’s bones, and clawed fingers vibrated in anticipation of clutching his innards.

  In that first moment of renewed, terrified awareness, Parno felt the pain of desperation, felt the panicked need to flee, run, roll away, lift his hands in defense, while having no ability to move. Then the horde of hellish appendages embraced him, taking his consciousness, and his pain.

  * * *

  Time is no medium, but a measure. Time does not schedule events, but indicates the rate of occurrence within dynamic systems. Ensconced in a relativistic state whose dynamics plodded, dull awareness inaccurately measuring recovery’s objective rate, Parno failed to recall his initial horror at being healed. Despite being assured of safety by their parents, children continue to fear the approach of a dentist’s tools. Though small, discreet, and redolent of yummy flavors, the tooth regrowing terminal still has to crawl inside the mouth, implying an attacking animal that will bite instead of painlessly ensuring proper biting.

  He understood improvement. Sick, been terrible sick, now getting better. Not exactly feeling better, but comprehending that healing had arrived, doled out in alien doses.

  Marry a beautiful woman only to find she’s such a bitch she could whelp puppies, and her beauty’s weight starts floating in your emotion. Though terrified when approached by a creature whose only threat is foreignness, a good patient feels better about the attacking medicine when recuperation allows finer thinking. Able to blink, seeing little, then looking while not seeing enough, Parno became accustomed to the cable-like metalette fingers pressing against his skull. Feeling better instead of dead, he no longer feared the moist, feathery fabric wrapped around his abdomen. Able to vaguely look, but not even partially move, Parno waited, not quite resting or expecting.

  Recuperation recommended an imminent schedule. Predicting the event of his recovery, emotion informed Parno that he should twitch, stretch, yawn. His first intended movement was to reach for his ear.

  “It looks funny,” spake the nearest demon, utilizing Kathlynn’s voice.

  Parno focused near and far, but could not turn his head. Too lethargic. Reaching all the way to his ear had taken the entirety of his effort. Those timely words, however, increased the rate of recollection’s occurrence. Nude now. The alien doc box had not removed his attire. Nude with Kathlynn. Tangling naked with the superfem. Parno recalled, his emotion measuring nothing good.

  “That was the worst sex I never had,” he said, and slept, exhausted from healing.

  * * *

  The chamber’s machines began retreating, one horror at a time. Supported not by the layered air of a ground suit nor the hardened air pad of a sled, but by a fabric imparting virtually no sensation, Parno felt the cable probes slip away from his scalp. The feeling was of a friend playfully pulling one’s hair. One’s ear.

  Able to turn, Parno looked to his side where the demon had spoken. There sat a chest-high box whose upper contours exactly fit a shapely fem. With eyes half-closed, Kathlynn lay beneath prods and fabs, head lolling, though not suggestive of discomfort. If the doc box were molesting her, Kathlynn evinced neither pleasure nor pain.

  “Are you dying?” Parno asked, his voice hoarse.

  She opened her eyes. Wide. Head static now.

  “Dreaming,” she said, voice stronger than Parno’s.

  “Of what?”

  “Dreaming of not dying,” she told him.

  “Hope it comes true.”

  “The dream of eating you better not.”

  He reached to touch his ear lobe. Too stiff, not smooth enough. During a previous dream, Kathlynn had mentioned this.

  “What do I have here?” he wondered.

  “It looks…alien,” she said, then closed her eyes.

  Parno did not argue.

  Neither Earther snored.

  * * *

  He felt no thirst, no hunger, no desire, no pain, and little energy. No chamber within this alien structure, to Parno’s recollection, had been so dim. What alien preferred to sleep in bright light? Sleep some more, wait for initiative to revive, then….

  He would have rested better if the alien beside him had not been flaunting her breasts at him.

  “Parno, Parno, you have to get up. We have to leave.”

  Kathlynn roughly shook Parno’s shoulder with one hand while attempting to don her underbare with the other. Her upper arm pressed against her breast, not in the way of caressing, but suggestive of molestation.

  Parno turned to respond. His response was to stare at her bosom. Time had scheduled the event of emotion to return to his dynamic system.

  “You dance divinely,” he said.

  Then he went blind, for Kathlynn tossed Parno’s attire against his face. As Parno pressed the fabric away, Kathlynn spoke one word.

  “Look.”

  Pulling her coveralls over her shoulders, Kathlynn nodded past Parno’s bed, to the far wall.

  He turned, trying to focus. Dim. Dim inside. Regardless, that indistinct, dark surface was difficult to focus on. Difficult to see, not being
a surface, but sheer depth, unending, a perpetual stack of ashes pressed from a death pyre toward infinity.

  Parno sat and began dressing. Kathlynn stepped away from him, away from the chamber’s black end. She passed the waiting terminals of the technol apparatus that had cured the Earthers, nubs of abdominal probes and tissue assuagers like prehensile tails on a medical animal. She stopped at a short wall.

  “That black depth should be on this side, too,” Kathlynn surmised. “This room has to be larger, but I don’t see an entry panel.”

  Parno then stepped beside her. He did not feel dizzy, but floating. He shook his head, trying to think.

  “I don’t feel capable of tremendous adventuring,” Parno admitted.

  “Do you feel capable of thorough dying?” Kathlynn snapped.

  “The intangible cannot kill us.”

  “Intangibles, such as love and hatred, cause war, murder, and suicide. Would you like sheer horror to manifest itself in some tangible form that destroys us both?”

  He only shook his head, looking toward that wall. Kathlynn then harshly pressed both hands against the stiff material. Proving herself no ghost, Kathlynn did not manage to dent the surface. Being corporeal, she could not influence it toward the metaphysical. Until she screamed.

  “Open the damn door!” she shouted, and the surface dissolved. The short wall dilated into the ceiling and floor and perpendicular, longer, walls, proving itself a temporary partition.

  He wondered of her energy. Had Kathlynn suffered a lesser form of alien food poisoning, or was her constitution superior to his?

  Of course. Only Parno had guzzled alien beer.

  Kathlynn stepped through the emotional opening. Parno followed, only to hear Kathlynn moan.

  “Oh no….”

  Dark beds like boxes, with no contoured tops, sat in a row. The material was not dark enough to camouflage the contents of each alien mattress. Former patients, former aliens, former persons. Currently they existed as carbon, each bed supporting a body in a black heap, forever ashes.

  The beds extended for fifty paces. Beyond lay a wall with no end, no color, no door. This ashen depth invited entry only by the unliving.

  “How did we enter this room?” Parno wondered aloud, feeling stronger now.

  He felt strength, and anger. How could he be frightened of nothing? How could a shadow cause such fear? Fear enough that Parno felt he could enter that burnt depth no more than he could kill himself. The acts, he felt, would be the same.

  Feeling too much anger, too much strength, Parno pressed past Kathlynn, looking to either side, along both walls, for an entry panel. Resurrecting their loutish activity when intoxicated by alien food, Parno bumped Kathlynn enough for her to stumble. She stumbled against a bed, which proved itself insubstantial by shifting, as though a gel. The gel box’s contents, that body heap on top, settled somewhat as though spread, raked by fingers.

  Though Kathlynn showed no distress, Parno grasped her elbow in apology, and they proceeded, looking along the walls, among the medical nubs with no patients to heal. But that thought remained within Parno. Raking those ashes with his fingers. He would rather bite off his hands.

  Forty Earth-norm paces later, Kathlynn had to moan.

  “Could we have gone the wrong way?”

  “We didn’t see any door where we came from,” Parno reminded her.

  “But I recall the loo,” Kathlynn said. “The door to the toilets was like that wall behind us, not like a parlor door. They’re not distinct, at least not to us.”

  “Yes, maybe we have to leave this chamber to find one of those distinct, ribbon-ending doors,” Parno suggested. “Let’s keep looking here, until we run out of wall space, or until….”

  Until Kathlynn shrieked. The sound ended their search, movement terminated by unmanifested feeling. As though impressed by pure emotion, Kathlynn had been terrified by nothing. Virtually nothing. Nothing more than shadow.

  A black ghost tore through the air, having entered through that dissolved hole of darkness. So decrepit as to drown in pure air, the ghost ripped its limbs in an awkward, crawling motion, its indistinct head shaking abruptly from side to side as though about to fall off, fly away. The dark form flew at an altitude of inches, no portion touching the chamber’s floor, propelled by a ragged flinging of limbs that shouted hatred and horror.

  The Earthers knew hideous screaming when it came to them as smell, the stench of a person burnt dead by hell’s hideous breath. This smoke stench screamed the horror of burning alive.

  Evil can influence righteous folk by fear’s intimidation. Indirectly influencing its former peers, the burnt ghost passed each lifeless ash heap, and the aliens’ unliving home responded. Struggling to move its vapid substance, the dark form passed the first bed, which spewed out that body’s contents. As though a pig slaughtered for its bacon, its torso split by the butcher’s blade, the box bed disgorged moist viscera, internal organs from a humanoid not specifiable as liver and heart and spleen, but as guts. In this era, even Earth physicians could regrow internal organs, but the alien doc boxes had turned perverse. The healing box contained more viscera than a family of humans. Reddish flesh spilled along the floor.

  Breathless as though suffocated by flames, Parno and Kathlynn stared for seconds, long enough for a body to turn to ashes, if cooked by a demon.

  As though to end his own paralysis, Parno harshly shoved Kathlynn.

  “Search every inch of that wall,” he yelled, his voice having grand volume and scant conviction.

  With four hands, the Earthers pressed against the flat surfaces of the longer, facing walls, trying not to look at that silent stench approaching through the air.

  With motions sourced in pain, motions painful to view, the smoke ghost passed another bed, which split seamlessly, depositing bright organs on the floor, slippery meat in rounded shapes and convoluted ropes, the light and dark meat of previous living.

  “Open up, we need you to open—please!” Parno blurted, his voice a croak.

  Pressing high and low, looking only to the wall at his face, Parno felt his feet slip. The blood and mucous on the floor provided poor traction to a desperate alien seeking an exit. Seeking an exit, and finding only an end. The Earthers had arrived at the chamber’s wall of intangible ashes.

  His hands dropping, Parno stared. The dark end revealed only black in its depths. Parno felt that he viewed an abyss, not an extension, a drop that would take him to nothing: no light, sensation, matter, or life. Pure nothingness is death for the living. He could not choose between facing the black ghost or the burned depth, for their ashes were identical.

  “Open up, open up! You have to let us out of here!”

  Kathlynn had been shouting for moments. The alien structure must have died in the heart to ignore the Earth fem’s passion. Without turning, Parno understood her activity. Kathlynn smacked her palms against the wall where she had already pressed. But she pressed again, for Kathlynn had come to the same end as Parno.

  At their feet, the sticky bowels of decent people collected. Parno looked down to alien kidneys or gizzards or secondary brains. He spoke, his voice loud but lacking passion.

  “Maybe I can run past it.”

  He and Kathlynn faced. Her eyes expressed such open, honest fear that Parno had to look away. Guts floated at knee height. She wanted to retch, but had been healed too perfectly for common illness to invade.

  Her coveralls would clean, he knew.

  The smoke ghost tortuously dug itself past another peer. Quiet intestines flopped out, collecting with the greater mass of hateful meat.

  “Run past it where?!” Kathlynn demanded, her voice unsteady, even ugly.

  “We tried everywhere but near our beds,” Parno said.

  He heard that awful voice. Loud but dull, dimwitted. Not lacking intelligence, he understood, but life.

  Their hands now floated in a bloody soup of human meat. Parno looked down to a round, reddish ball of flesh that seemed connect
ed by a paler tube of skin to a flatter organ, connected to a string of globular intestines, to a long….

  With all the bloody meat and mucus, Parno smelled only smoke.

  Turning in the waist-high mess, Parno viewed along the path traveled by himself, Kathlynn, and the dark, dead figure. Parno nearly wept with relief to see that the smoke ghost was no more terrifying when viewed from only twenty feet away. And no less. Those grabbing limbs would remove his life and leave nothing, no feeling, no joy, no fear, no expectation, replaced by pain, agony, torture, despair….

  “We, we could go in there!”

  Kathlynn’s words came in a choke. Foreign guts now obscured her bosom. She had delineated the impossible choice: enter the burnt void, or face its inhabitant.

  Parno then learned cowardice. When facing terror becomes impossible, look away. Turning perpendicular to the chamber’s black end, seeing only Kathlynn’s brilliant face, he ran sideways into the void.

  Darkness engulfed him after one step. He did not sense himself falling, but felt the terror of rushing absolutely with no hope of arriving ever, anywhere.

  As Parno entered the void, Kathlynn saw another ghost. His limbs churned as though he tried to escape a horror at his back, but his body moved nowhere. Ensconced in that first step of shadow, he seemed dim, as though fading from life. Kathlynn saw no viscera around him, only empty nothingness that threatened to absorb him. Looking backwards, Parno seemed to be staring at a sight that caused such fear he could not end his flight, running forever, haunted while still alive.

  She grabbed his flailing arm and pulled with all of her effort, sloshing guts unnoticed. As Parno turned, she grasped his shoulder and upper body, jerking backwards until Parno regained his starting place, limbs unmoving and lungs trembling from perverse exertion.

  Parno felt that he had been nowhere for a terrible length of time. But he felt calm, an impression that left as Parno saw the horror on Kathlynn’s face, saw the evil in which she stood.