An Atmosphere Of Angels

by H C Turk

  Some pure form of feeling overcame Parno in that instant. He clenched his teeth, and for a moment, blacked out. Instantaneously come and gone, the intensity signified a change, from desperation to fury.

  “Let’s see if it can kill me,” he gasped, and left the fem behind.

  He turned, stroking through the guts, not swimming, but forcing his way through the impediment, his progress as full of effort as the ghost’s. In that moment, they seemed to be clawing their way together, meeting in the middle of their land for combat that could kill only one. Then the deceased alien halted.

  The smoke ghost had arrived at a bed that floated, the other healing boxes now drowned in viscera. This bed had the special aspect of retaining a pile of ashes identical in emotion to the dark form that could not pass. Could not pass its own remains. Appearing purely human, the dark figure halted, bending over that black heap. Upon moving again, the ghost did not proceed toward the Earthers. Stationary, the shadow form bent at the waist, its head twitching, shoulders shaking, limbs twitching not from propulsion, but sorrow.

  Rushing from the bed in a steady flow, fresh intestines from no living humanoids rose above the bed’s ashes, soon covering the defeated, demented shadow.

  Parno and Kathlynn now floated in the gut stew. The Earthers did not require any swimming exertions to remain upright, floating the same as the remaining flesh. A glossy, grey organ, suggesting an apple in shape but with two thickened stems, bobbed against Parno’s face. He had the strangest feeling that he would never, never vomit again.

  The smell was of healthy blood, and deadly fire.

  Less influenced by the stricken ghost, the alien chamber achieved improved function. The gut stew began flowing, downward and toward the Earthers’ healing beds. With his head against a stomach or intestinal sac, Parno felt bloody mucus sticking to his face, then understood that in seconds he would pass beside the stricken ghost. On the chamber’s far side, Kathlynn swung both arms as though swimming, cooperating with the flow. A flow that proceeded away from that dead void behind.

  Moving swiftly now, the current propelled the Earthers toward that space between their healing boxes, where an opening formed. As though children bored with their own homes, they had not explored the area within an arm’s reach.

  Upon entering the adjacent chamber, the Earthers could walk again. They did not hesitate now, recognizing the alien loo. Sloshing through the receding stew, Parno and Kathlynn proceeded to that permanent door with the cylindrical pattern. As though accepting an Earth-norm method of travel, both Parno and Kathlynn collapsed to their knees on the ribbon, but fell no farther. Side by side they traveled, not enjoying the wondrous transport, only hoping that for this peaceful passage they had left death behind.

  Chapter 10

  Movement From The Living Dead

  “Shut up, you bastard! I will die before I go in there again!”

  After shouting to Parno, Kathlynn returned to her previous position: rump flat on the floor, elbows on her knees, head in her hands.

  Parno remained standing. He did not take a step. Moving made him uncomfortable. Now he smelled the bodily fluids inundating his coveralls, his hair. The smell of dead animals.

  “Kathlynn, if we return to the loo, we will be cleaned. We will feel better. We will not be so rank to each other.”

  “I’m sorry you find me rank,” Kathlynn muttered. “I have no complaints about you.”

  “Your hair, it’s, it’s glued to your shoulders with blood.”

  “Thank you for mentioning that.”

  “How long do you suggest we remain here?” Parno asked. “The parlor, after all, is just a foyer.”

  “It’s a lobby,” she snorted. “It never was a parlor. Homes have parlors. Houses of detention have lobbies. Heaven has a parlor, but hell has a lobby.”

  “Kathlynn, would you like to yell and scream about the revolting sea of guts you just had to swim through? Or about the hideous, black ghost that brought such absolute terror you almost longed for death, just so you would no longer have to suffer fear?”

  She looked up to him now, her lower lip trembling.

  “That’s exactly how I felt, you bastard, and you know it!’

  “That’s exactly how I felt, too, and I am so numb, I can hardly feel gratitude for being alive.”

  She stared at him until her lip stopped trembling.

  “I’m sorry I called you a bastard,” she told him, her hard tone scarcely suggesting an apology.

  “I never called you a bitch, but I was considering it. You are rank, however.”

  “I could not be so revolting as you are,” she added with no inflection. “Your hair looks like a possum run down by a wheel car.”

  “Your face resembles something I just floated past, except beautiful. Somewhere behind the slime.”

  “That’s amusing. Let’s consider how amused we would be to face that hideous, black thing five minutes after we left it behind.”

  “You determined its abilities yourself, Kathlynn. The ghost can only travel among rooms where aliens died. Rooms with void ends. That’s not the loo. The loo is as secure as this lobby.”

  “Parlor. But on the other side of the loo wall, Parno…. If we do something foolish, and cause a door to open onto the infirmary….”

  Most of Kathlynn’s face remained dry, but Parno saw a glint in the corner of one eye. Not a tear, but a piece of tissue, stringy. As a kid, his dad would take him fishing. Parno learned to clean fish. Scraping away the little strings holding the guts to the flesh was annoying. Kathlynn had been cleaning fish, and rubbed her face with her hand before washing up.

  He had to look away. For the remainder of his life, Parno knew, he would eat smoke ghosts rather than meat.

  “The ghost is gone from there now, Kathlynn. And the chamber has cleaned itself. You understand, of course, that since the ghost is chasing us, it will soon arrive at one of these panels and try to press through. Right here in our little haven. I hate that so much.”

  “I hate it more, Parno. I hate it so much I could vomit.”

  “If you did, no one would notice.”

  She did not stand until he offered a hand. But Kathlynn’s fingers slipped from his. Too slimy. She stood on her own, but did not lead the way to that door with the pleasant pattern. Kathlynn was last to leave the parlor.

  * * *

  Standing in the alien sphere of cleansing, Parno felt himself floating. He did not understand the technols in the floor that imparted the feel of free fall. It was only a feeling, because the floor did support his weight. Cleansed by a perfect breeze, Parno was most satisfied by his mindlessness. He did not consider the experience of floating in viscera. He did not recall the feeling of facing the infirmary’s dead depths: those lifeless voids extending beyond the walls, and the smoke ghost whose movements extended beyond life. Yes, a ghost: an unsettled creature whose only substance was emotion: a force powerful enough to end life, and to separate the dead from lasting peace.

  Neither did mindless Parno gloat at his own salvation. In this mutable world of foreign death and deathless retribution, tranquility was as alien as human life. In this realm, Parno and Kathlynn were not visitors, but perversions.

  The next perversion attacked his ears.

  “Are you dead yet?” a familiar voice asked.

  Though Kathlynn remained in her own bathing sphere, her voice seemed to have emanated from Parno’s locale. He turned, but saw only the contiguous wall. Reflexively he touched his refurbished ear lobe. It felt like an internal organ.

  “Not yet. You?”

  “I think I’ll stay here long enough to die. Parno, I am so clean, I feel…transparent.”

  “Bad choice of words,” he muttered.

  Failure then attacked him. Failing in his thoughtlessness, Parno suffered an idea, and an emotion. He understood that in that moment, he had no desire for Kathlynn. Not as a sexual partner nor as an animation of beauty. His accompanying emotion was more mundane, being common dejec
tion.

  They met in the middle. Fully clothed, the Earthers faced each other without truly looking. Kathlynn’s current version of a haughty demeanor seemed more bored weariness than snobbery. Parno did not look at her body, only her head.

  “How does it manage to brush our hair so perfectly?” he wondered, touching the top of his head, finding no unruly mass.

  “That’s why the walls have no comb dispensers, or towels, or hand dryers.”

  Kathlynn turned to the left, to the right, taking one indefinite step, not twitching, but not settled.

  “I wonder if we could find a tailor here,” Parno said. “These coveralls will never wear out, but I think they attract dirt. And guts, and ghosts….”

  Still not looking toward Parno, Kathlynn frowned.

  “Let’s go,” she said quietly, brushing exquisitely clean hair away from her ear.

  Parno refrained from touching his repaired lobe.

  “Where are we going?”

  “Let’s leave the ship right away.”

  “How?”

  “I don’t know how,” she seethed, snapping a brief look to Parno’s face, then turning away, taking another half step nowhere.

  “I agree. Let’s return to the lobby and try another chamber.”

  Dead static now, Kathlynn glared at Parno, hands clutching her opposing upper arms. She did not appear angry. Feeling selfish, recuperated Parno did not want to share her distress. He looked over her shoulder, at nothing.

  In this alien cemetery, the dead did not remain static.

  “Yes, ‘chamber’ is the correct word,” she scowled. “Parno, we need to understand that all we’re doing is going from one torture chamber to another.”

  “It’s pleasant in here.”

  “I don’t want to live the remainder of my life in an alien toilet!” she exclaimed.

  “I agree. And you have to agree with me that remaining here will not provide us with an exit. Therefore, we must examine the remainder of this structure.”

  “The remainder of this cemetery,” she spat.

  “Living people can enter and exit cemeteries,” Parno mentioned.

  “Not if they throw themselves into an open grave and begin pulling soil over their own faces.”

  “Since we can’t exit the structure from this room, Kathlynn, we have to continue. The more we proceed, the more we learn.”

  Kathlynn’s body went rigid as she demanded:

  “What in the world have we learned so far? We’ve learned despicable experiences that will haunt us forever—if we survive them.”

  “If you think harder, Kathlynn, you will understand that death has never been imminent for us. Only the feeling of death, and that’s just fear. That’s the most important thing we’ve learned. Think of it. The worst damage that occurred to us is when we beat each other up, and that was caused by food poisoning.”

  “Which means we can never eat in here, which means we cannot survive.”

  “It means we cannot readily die in here,” Parno insisted. “The dark entity, whether ghost or shaped energy, can’t hurt us—because it’s intangible. It can only make us undergo unnerving situations.”

  “‘Unnerving’?” Kathlynn spat. “Situations so horrifying they almost stop your heart are not ‘unnerving’—they are maddening. Parno, many people have selected death rather than lives of insane torment.”

  “Oh? Are you suggesting that you might kill yourself now, you chicken-shit pussy?”

  Kathlynn’s mouth roiled as though she were about to spit.

  “You’re not really a sub-bastard, Parno, so I know you’re only trying to rile me. Rile me into entering another suicidal, alien enterprise.”

  “Well, if you’d rather be dead than scared, Kathlynn, let’s take more chances.”

  “You’re contradicting yourself, anthro thief. If we can’t die here, we’ll only continue terrifying ourselves until we are utterly mad. With me, that’s about one alien moment away!”

  Kathlynn turned from him. Parno did not like her look. Though appearing angry, Kathlynn had a type of dejection that caused her expression to sag.

  “Would it make you feel better if I screwed you?” he asked with no inflection.

  Again appearing ready to spit, Kathlynn snarled:

  “You are a sub-bastard after all.”

  “Either that assessment or its preceding antithesis proves the inaccuracy of your thinking.”

  “Don’t speak to me as though you were a Stellar Service thief brown-nosing an ENU supervisor. We are no longer in those positions.”

  “Yes, the positions we now have is that I want to live, and you’d just as soon die. Very well, here’s what we’ll do.”

  “I don’t think I care to follow your instructions.”

  “You don’t have a choice,” he retorted. “Since you’re too gutless to make your own decisions, you have no choice but to follow me. Here’s what I’m doing. What’s the worst door we haven’t tried? The one showing outer space. I’m going there, and jumping through. You’re too much of a lemming pussy to formulate your own plan, so you’ll follow, and drown in vacuum. Then we’ll find ourselves back here, haunting the place in the form of space ghosts. I’ll see you in orbit.”

  Parno walked to the chamber’s ribbon door, pressed it open, and stepped through.

  For a moment, Kathlynn did not move. She did call out loudly to Parno’s back.

  “I’m not only your supervisor, I’m your superior. You are weaker than I, because you lost your mind first—super-bastard!”

  Parno did not hear all of her tirade, because the panel had closed behind him. Quickly looking over her shoulder to see that neither ghost nor guts seeped through the wall connecting loo and infirmary, Kathlynn calmly stepped to the panel. She waited another moment, not wanting Parno to think that she followed from fear. Kathlynn followed because she did not want to be left alone in an alien toilet. The creatures who could molest a girl were unthinkable. Likely thoughtless, being dead.

  She pressed through the door, the ribbon rug taking Kathlynn to her peer.

  * * *

  Standing shoulder to shoulder in the floor’s center, they selected their doom. They had not entered the doors with: symbols, an animal, massed shapes, or space.

  Parno stepped toward the galaxy.

  “Let’s guess,” he said, staring at stars applied as tiny, textured strokes, all different. No humanoid hand could be small enough, he felt, to apply this minuscule texture. A technol brush would be required for art on the level of molecular surgery.

  “The panels display the contents of the torture chambers, Parno,” Kathlynn quipped. “This door must lead to an airlock. We will step onto the ribbon and be whisked into deep space, sans our ground suits.”

  “Great,” Parno beamed, “that’s just what we want.”

  Kathlynn gave him that recently acquired look of revulsion. One day, she would not refrain from spitting on him.

  “Since this structure is not situated in space, Kathlynn, when the ribbon whisks us out, we’ll find ourselves on the Kapnos island.”

  “Let’s consider the rest of these panels before we decide, Parno.”

  “What about the door with geometric forms, superfem?”

  Kathlynn stepped near that panel, looking closely.

  “I see simple and complicated 3D geometric forms. Many are connected, which has generated objects of even greater complexity. The forms all have differing surface textures: reminiscent of stone, metals, complases, and so on.”

  “It’s a bunch of machines. Perhaps the drive bay.”

  “A reasonable guess, Parno. And this panel, with the small animal.”

  “It looks like a rodent.”

  “Parno, it resembles a kitten.”

  “I don’t like cats.”

  “I don’t like rats.”

  “Perhaps it’s a kitchen.”

  “Or a zoo. A petting zoo.”

  “Kathlynn, I don’t care to pet any alien rodents.” />
  “Would you rather eat them?”

  “Perhaps a possum yet to be run down by a wheel car.”

  “Parno, perhaps we see this structure’s inhabitant.”

  “That would make this chamber the throne room. You’re looking at the king of this structure.”

  “Or the supervisor,” Kathlynn smirked.

  Considering Parno’s dreary sensibilities, the pleasure Kathlynn brought with that smirk surpassed common joy. For a moment, he could not speak, overcome by a smile.

  “What about this door with symbols?” Kathlynn wondered. “I’m guessing education, communication, perhaps entertainment, such as reading—a library. The symbols look like kanji.”

  “They do not remotely resemble kanji,” Parno insisted. “My wife was Japanese, so I know kanji.”

  “Did you love her a great deal?” Kathlynn had to ask.

  “She had the most perfect figure.”

  “That’s typical of a man,” Kathlynn said, “or a Stellar Service financial thief. I ask if you loved the person and you say you craved her figure. What am I in comparison, a cow?”

  “Yes.”

  Startled, Kathlynn could not speak for a long moment.

  “I’m sure that perfectly covers your understanding of love.”

  “What are you trying to say, Kathlynn? Do you think I love livestock?”

  “How long have you taken pride in being the most impossible alien in the universe to converse with?”

  “Kathlynn, first you mention love, then I hint at sexuality, so you beg me to say you’re voluptuous, then you complain that I am difficult to speak with? I already told you I wanted to screw you at first sight—does hearing that again make you happy?”

  “Yes,” she said, and stepped away.

  He refused to consider her active, feminine gait sexy.

  “I’ll see you on the beach,” she said haughtily, and pressed both palms against perfectly small stars.

  Parno entered the ribbon conveyor three steps behind her. They did not look to each other, did not consider stepping near. The journey satisfied neither alien.

  When the wall dilated open and the ribbon stopped, Parno and Kathlynn peered inside. Before them extended the largest chamber they had seen. Parno’s initial impression was of a warehouse. High ceiling without graceful clouds, only moderate light, walls with no pleasant apparent textures, large floor space. The opposing wall’s only feature was a vast panel with stars. Between starry panel and entry, stacked boxes like clear garages filled with pale amber covered much of the floor. No sound came, no smell, no movement.