Mind's Horizon

by Eric Malikyte

  "Help me get Eddy," Nico said, startling Hugo.

  "Whoa, B," Hugo said. "Scared the shit outta me."

  "We're going to tie him to the sled."

  Hugo nodded.

  Nico seemed different somehow.

  They descended through the manhole and grabbed Eddy's unconscious body. Hugo wondered, as they hoisted him up through the hatch, whether he was in a coma or something.

  He couldn't imagine that he'd survive the trip back.

  When Eddy's body was secure atop the supplies they'd packed on the sled, Nico got in the driver's seat and beckoned Hugo on.

  "Let's move," Nico said.

  Hugo nodded and did as the boss-man asked.

  The look in his eyes. He'd seen that look before for sure. Back when he'd holed himself up in the Riverside Library, rationing old bags of potato chips and pretzels to keep himself from starving.

  Lena had been with him. Nico had drawn his gun on him. Hugo had been certain he was gonna pull the trigger, but Lena had stopped him. Said they should take him in. Maybe she’d been sweet on him from the very beginning?

  He was pretty fuckin' baller, even now. He couldn't blame her.

  They came to Lake Alice's frozen, decrepit entrance. During the war, his rep had gotten so bad he couldn't show his face here without someone threatening to beat his ass for the shit he'd said in his videos about the Revolutionists, saying they were gonna be judged by God in the end and all that. He’d just been talkin' out his ass, of course. He didn't know the first thing about politics, but it was good for business, even if all he did was blow smoke.

  "Get that snowmobile running," Nico said.

  It was covered in about five inches of fresh snow. Hopefully the gas tank hadn’t been empty enough for it to freeze. "I'll give it a go, boss-man."

  "Do more than that," Nico said. "It's your ass if we lose it."

  "How's that my fault?"

  "Don't argue with me. You don't have the right."

  Hugo grabbed the brush and scraper he'd packed with the supplies, making sure to dig around Eddy's body, and sulked over to the snowmobile.

  With his finger, he wiped off the dashboard. The tank needed filling.

  He walked back and grabbed the gas can.

  Nico watched him carefully as he worked. He had the snowmobile cleared shortly, and got its engine running.

  Nico stared forward, revving the engine. "Follow me."

  Hugo watched him take off into the frozen corpse of the city. Eddy's coat flapping in the wind, his body bouncing and shaking at every turn and snowy hill.

  Maybe you should have got cut, Hugo thought. Fucking asshole.

  He pushed the thought aside, climbed up on the snowmobile, and took off after Nico.

  7

  Mathias had been sitting for hours, staring at A Brief History of Time's tattered cover.

  He was having a tough time keeping his eyes open. There was no real telling day from night down here. He could have sworn the clocks they’d brought with them were set to the correct time...but how could any of them be sure?

  He glanced at the clock on the control panel. It read 10:00 am...and then it read 12:00 pm. Just like that.

  Mathias sat forward, tapping the clock's glass casing...but the time didn't change.

  It must have been a glitch. That's what it was. But, when he checked his own watch, it too read 12:00pm.

  He ran his hands through his hair.

  He needed sleep.

  That's all.

  Last night's nightmare had left him sleep-deprived.

  His eyes drifted to the facility's broken doors, lying and freezing on the ramp leading out into the ice cavern.

  No one was coming. Hell, Nico and the others would probably be gone for another day.

  "I deserve a nap," Mathias said.

  He stood up, slipped his coat on and headed toward the elevator down the next hall.

  His cot felt like heaven. He didn't bother undressing.

  He set his alarm for three hours. That seemed reasonable.

  A black comet the size of a large sun blazed a path across a crimson sky; the waves of its ion tail had the consistency of oil, casting ripples into the infinite dark.

  Mathias couldn't believe his eyes. He stood atop a canyon of some kind. All around him, towering, ancient, impossible structures, lit carmine by the sky above. Their supports were carved into the visages of massive creatures with three eyes and too many limbs.

  "Where am I?" His voice echoed down into the canyon.

  That's when he saw it.

  The masked figure from his nightmares, towering over him like a giant.

  Its tattered robes billowed in the musty winds of this strange place. Its ancient mask looked even older than the ruins. When he looked into its eyeholes, he saw nothing but darkness staring back at him.

  An abyss.

  "Who are you?" Mathias asked.

  The mask had a grin etched into it.

  The thing in the mask pointed to a series of gargantuan stone steps, which led down into the canyon. Its cloak's sharp, tattered edges glided as it moved down the steps, beckoning Mathias along with appendages which looked far too large to be hands.

  His first inclination was to ignore the strange creature and strike off on his own, but, for some reason, he found himself mesmerized by its dragging cloak, following after it like some drooling, empty-headed fool.

  The path became strange. When Mathias tried to look up at the canyon walls, get a glimpse at the towering monolithic buildings made—presumably—by a long-dead civilization, he saw only the roof of a square tunnel overhead.

  When he lowered his head, there was a light at the end of the tunnel, a doorway, which silhouetted his newfound companion.

  "Hey, what the hell is this?" Mathias asked, but the creature did not reply.

  On they marched. The doorway never grew in size. The perfect tilework cascaded beneath his feet with each step they took, but still they gained no distance at all.

  Then, they were at the base of a stone pyramid missing massive chunks. Those chunks floated in the sky of that strange place, reflecting red off the light of that awful sky. The black comet was so close he could feel its heat slowly boiling his skin. When he stared at the cratered horizon, he could almost make out several small worlds, crumbling into the mouth of the comet... But, that was insane. Comets don't have mouths.

  The masked figure did not wait; it sped off toward the pyramid.

  Mathias chased after it, not wanting to be left alone on the surface facing that thing.

  The inside of the pyramid was oddly familiar to him. The corridors were curved, and they led to many different rooms which were blocked off. As much as he wanted to stay and examine them, the masked thing marched on, and he was compelled to follow.

  They came to a large chamber, perhaps at the center of the pyramid, with immense, cylindrical tubes scattered atop a circular platform. There were dead, crumbling consoles, whose wires had long since been eaten away by time.

  The strangest thing was the bottom most portion of the wall. It was a kind of tube, raised above the door in which they entered; it was not unlike a particle collider.

  Mathias was so busy gawking at the room that he lost track of the masked figure. Now, when he looked around the chamber, it was nowhere to be found.

  "What am I supposed to do with this?" he asked, but all he heard was the echo of his own voice in reply.

  Then. The place began to shake. He saw great fissures and cracks form instantly in the stone walls, ruining the perfect craftsmanship.

  Mathias scrambled for the corridor he’d come through earlier. Large stone debris rained down on the circular platform behind him. A part of him ached when he saw the place crumbling to ruins. What he'd give for just a few more minutes to study that place!

  The tunnel stretched on and on and on, dust filling the air as he sprinted as fast as his scrawny legs would allow.

  Finally, he made it out into the open, but
his feet did not touch the dusty surface. Instead, he floated, spiraling around in the dark until he spun around to face the pyramid.

  What he saw drove him slightly mad with laughter. The brilliant jaws of something his brain could not quite comprehend had cracked the moon he had just been on in two. Chunks of it were being devoured, swallowed by a black hole in the center of this thing. Staring at the pyramid's shattered face, his peripheral vision interpreted the comet's shape like he was staring at an ever-changing inkblot test.

  He felt his body falling toward the thing. His screams were heard by no one.

  Mathias woke in darkness. For a moment, he wondered if he had been swallowed by that thing. His head hurt, badly.

  Groaning, he sat up. The air, wherever he was now, was stale. He tried standing up, found the cold touch of metal, then the slightly warmer caress of smooth stone, and finally, the hard plastic of a light switch.

  Finally, something normal. But he hesitated for a moment to flip the switch, remembering the thing he’d seen. The thing that broke his mind.

  He decided it was just a dream, a nightmare, probably the result of being in a strange new place, and flipped the switch.

  He was in one of the experiment rooms, one they had yet to discover.

  How the hell had he gotten here?

  There was something oddly familiar about it.

  The metal he'd touched in the dark wrapped around the base of the room. Mathias instantly knew what it was, too. A particle collider, just like the one he'd seen in his nightmare...

  That had to be a coincidence, right? Surely, he’d just been sleep walking.

  He decided this was the appropriate answer.

  Then why was his heart racing so hard?

  Mathias ran his hand over the collider's cold aluminum surface. Its touch almost erased his panic. He couldn't help but smile. His eyes traced the curve of the collider eagerly, following the wires that snaked from the metallic tank in the center of the chamber. The wiring was bunched together under coils, revealing strange symbols and shapes painted on the floor beneath them.

  The symbols too were familiar to him.

  He walked over to the tank, ducking beneath some copper wiring suspended in the air surrounding the tank. At a distance, the wiring created the image of two diametrically opposed triangles, forced into occupying the same space. The configuration created a certain amount of visual balance in the experiment room.

  That was the major difference between this room and the one Nico and Ira had discovered. There was also no surgical table. How many other rooms like this were there?

  Mathias popped the latches on the tank and peered inside.

  "How odd," he said.

  It was a sensory deprivation tank. The saline solution was still there, albeit discolored, with sensors and tubes running down either side of the interior—presumably for cycling fresh solution into the tank.

  He closed the lid.

  The chamber also featured a two-way mirror and an observation room on the other side. He made his way into the observation room, turned the lights on, and scanned over the monitors. All of the wires and components seemed to be undamaged; he pressed the power button to one of the terminals. The machine fired up; the monitor turned on and displayed several sets of numbers and bars of data. The software and interface was unfamiliar to him, probably proprietary.

  The data, however, he understood very well. Each set of numbers correlated to measuring different kinds of stress on the human body, as well as graphs showing beta and alpha waves coming from the subject's brain. He clicked around on the interface and saw that there was a recording dating back just six months ago. He clicked to play the file.

  Unlike the one Ira had discovered on the network, the video had no introduction. Mathias saw the chamber he'd just been examining, and a man with auburn hair and pale skin standing naked before the sensory deprivation tank. There appeared to be no sound on the recording. The man climbed inside the tank and closed the hatch, and shortly thereafter the particle collider lit up with white-hot glowing light. The wires surrounding the tank began to glow as well, creating a strange pattern within the glass pyramid. He scratched his head; where had he seen that structure before?

  Mathias's eyes darted back and forth between the video and the chamber on the other side of the glass. The video seemed to distort for a second, and as his eyes returned to it, there was a bright flash inside the chamber. The camera followed another man in a hazmat suit as he inspected the tank. When he opened it, there was no one inside, but the saltwater now took on a greenish hue.

  "Fascinating," he said. "Perhaps you succeeded, after all?"

  "Mathias, where the fuck are you?" Nico's voice, as abrasive and full of false authority as always, echoed from his CB. "Lena says it was supposed to be your turn for guard duty!"

  "Back so soon? I must have passed out..." He almost blurted it right out. It'd be best not to reveal that he had been sleepwalking. "I thought I was due for a break."

  "I have no time to argue with you, we've got injured up here, and we need all the help we can get bringing supplies in. Get your ass up here!"

  There was no point arguing with him, not this time. Mathias turned to leave, but before he could reach the door to the observation chamber, he caught a glimpse of a small booklet. It was resting on the edge of one of the consoles.

  Mathias picked it up.

  It appeared to be a diary of some sort.

  He pocketed it. If nothing else, it would make for an interesting read.

  Mathias retreated into the hall and found himself on the elevator to the surface entrance.

  He'd return to this chamber later.

  In any case, he felt that he was beginning to better understand the experiments that went on here. The idea that sensory deprivation could allow a person to break through to other universes, or to celestial beings, was not a new idea. John C. Lilly, the man who created the first sensory deprivation tank in 1954, had believed exactly that. His experiments had started with using a crude standing chamber; the subjects were fitted with a nightmarish blackout mask, which fed air into their lungs.

  The mask proved distracting to the overall experience, so Lilly had refined the design to be a sitting bath with a cover to block out all light; it was filled with a salt-water solution which regulated the temperature of the body so that the brain couldn't tell where the skin ended and the water began.

  Lilly had claimed that the tank allowed him to make contact with a more advanced civilization, and even dubbed the event, "The First Conference of Three Beings."

  These experiments, however, were far more than that. The strange hieroglyphic symbols he'd seen in the first video were evidence enough of that.

  Mathias shivered when he thought of the thing he'd seen in his nightmare. The comet’s shifting, rippling edges, and the black hole that he’d seen inside of its mouth...

  What if Lilly and Weber hadn’t been crazy?

  Then perhaps Doctor Weber had been on to something here? What if it were true? What if an altered state of mind, such as meditation, or even a state beyond that, could actually open up the gateway to another universe? The occult trappings of the experiment chambers, with their pyramidal structures and circles, were a touch silly to Mathias, but, then again, even he had to admit that there was a certain appeal to the designs, a certain power even.

  He chuckled. Maybe it was he who had gone mad?

  The scientists who had run this facility had all vanished. The others in his group hadn't even raised the question: where had they gone? Sure, there were bodies in a few of the experiment chambers, but it was easy to guess that those belonged to the subjects of failed experiments. Clearly there hadn't been time to clean up the mess, only time to move on to the next one. They had been desperately scrambling to find the answer, before the ice age consumed the world.

  Mathias smiled.

  This facility is more than just a temporary haven, a den of false hope and security, he thought. If I
don't unlock its secrets, we will all die in this frozen hell.

  The elevator came to a stop. Nico and the others were huddled around a body draped over a sled full of supplies. Mathias stepped out into the entrance and zipped up his jacket.

  "Mathias," Nico said. "You took your sweet time getting up here."

  The body belonged to Eddy. Blood soaked through the bandages wrapped around his throat.

  "You should have left him," Mathias said. "He's going to bleed out all over the supplies, ruin them."

  Nicola's eyes said it all: those dangerous, green eyes, so full of hatred for people like him. "There are two other sleds full of supplies, get them in here."

  "While you and Hugo play with his corpse?"

  "I am armed. Don't argue with me."

  Mathias pushed his facemask up, covered his head with his hood, and watched them cart Eddy's body into the elevator.

  Why was he still smiling?

  8

  "Goddamn it." Ira covered her mouth. "How long has it been...can you save him?"

  Lena didn't answer; she paced around Eddy’s body, her eyes dancing over his wounds, like a machine analyzing a damaged engine.

  "Lena, answer me."

  "Get her out of here," Lena said. "We don't have much time and she'll only get in the way."

  Nico grabbed Ira by the shoulders and dragged her out of the infirmary. She didn't go willingly, but even after an elbow to the groin, her brother still managed to get her out of the room. Hugo sealed the door behind them. Ira found herself pounding on the glass wall to the infirmary as Lena cleaned and dressed Eddy's wounds.

  He looked so lifeless lying there.

  She couldn't tell if Lena was saving him or killing him.

  "He'll pull through, Ira," Nico said quietly. "We just need to be patient."

  There was a quiver in his voice.

  "Yeah, Eddy's tough as balls, yo," Hugo said, his voice full of conviction. The look in his eyes, however, did not seem so confident. "Shoulda seen what he did to the cat that did it. Straight alpha."

  "Jesus, Hugo, will you shut the fuck up?" Nico said.

  "I was just saying..."

  Hugo's mouth stopped running when he saw how Ira was looking at him.