You can do this, she thought.
She grabbed an open medical bag. Inside, there was some gauze, bandages, and a half-empty bottle of generic pain medication.
Her shaky hands found a scalpel, dropped it in the bag.
She made her way to the shelf, picked out a bottle of penicillin and several others. She listened to them clacking together in the bag, not bothering to read the labels.
There was a first aid kit fixed to the wall; she walked over and yanked it off, then strapped it to her shoulder. She rolled a chair around and sat down, took a deep breath, considering anything else she might need.
"Are you finished?" Mathias asked.
"What, like you weren't watching me?" she said.
"I have other things to do, so let's get you moving."
Scanning the room, her eyes caught the gleaming screen of a small phone—probably left by one of the researchers. It was resting on one of those wireless charging stations. She couldn't help but think of the streaks of blood she'd found on the floor the first time she'd come in here. Nico had begrudgingly cleaned it up for her one night, so she wouldn't have to think about it; but it was always in the back of her mind. Maybe it had belonged to whoever died in here?
If she could just get to it, slip it in the bag... "Can I just take a breather?"
"No."
"And why not? You have complete control of the facility, it's not like I'm going to run off. You can leave me here for a little while, let me rest, and go do whatever it is you were going to do."
"I don't trust you. Now, get up and continue your search. Unless you'd like to return to your cell."
Maybe if she could just knock it into her bag on her way out of the med bay? She stood up, trying not to let her line of sight betray her intention. "Fine."
The chair creaked when she stood up. She licked her lips. Then, after taking a deep breath, she walked toward the automatic doors, taking a moment to swipe the phone into her bag—
The air seized out of her lungs before she even reached the doors. The lights shut off, and she fell to her knees.
Mathias was still talking, but the blood was rushing to her ears, turning his words to whispered nonsense. Still, she got the hint. It took everything she had to dig the phone out and toss it to the linoleum.
Air filled her lungs. Her head felt like it was filled with white noise as she lay there coughing—
That's when she saw it. Not the creature with the seven eyes, but something else.
Was she safe on the other side of the med bay's glass walls?
The lights seemed to flicker and die around each of its lumbering steps. It was massive, its head nearly scraping at the ceiling of the corridor. She was too terrified to look away...what if it found her? Was this the Harvester thing that Mathias spoke of? Was he going to replace himself with her?
Tears broke from her eyes...then she caught a glimpse of gleaming reflected light off two eyeballs. There was a face, drifting off to the side of a massive silhouetted bulge of flesh and shadow, a face that seemed to be melting, twisting, cracking into madness.
A face she recognized.
It lumbered down the corridor, down the way she’d come. It seemed to be heading for the elevator.
Before long, it was gone.
The lights plinked back on one by one.
2
It took Ira a few breaths to notice what had happened. Each breath was shorter than the last, a struggle to find the air to fill her lungs, then there wasn't any at all. She fell to the floor, clutching at the bed with a death grip. There were sounds, her heartbeat, her brain cells committing suicide from the lack of oxygen. She rolled over, clutching at the bedding, and noticed that Hugo was doubled over as well.
A smile traveled across her face.
If she were to die now, fine, as long as her brother's murderer went with her.
Then it was all over, the air returned to her lungs, and Hugo sat back up, holding his stupid head.
Static echoed over the speakers. She thought she heard Mathias's voice. He'd been quiet since Lena left. She’d rolled over, content to let sleep take her, when the door slammed.
She sat up too fast, giving herself a head rush as the gate opened and Lena fell into a ball, rocking back and forth on the floor next to Nico's dried blood stain.
"What happened?" Ira asked, coming to her aid. Lena was shaking violently, staring at her hands.
"W-we...we found him..."
Her heart jumped. "Eddy!"
Lena nodded. Something was wrong. Ira sat up, holding her breath.
"I saw his face, Ira, I saw it melting into that thing...it was so big...it looked right at me! I can't get it out of my head!"
She couldn't help but think of her nightmare.
His eyes are gone, replaced with blackened pits, leaking a dark substance that smolders and smokes and smells like burning matches. His face seems to be melting into something larger. His mouth is forever open, teeth crooked and wrong, always frowning, always sad.
"I'm afraid she's losing her grip," Mathias said.
"What the hell is she talking about?" Ira stood up, pleading with the cameras. "Why is she telling me you found Eddy?"
"I don't know what she's talking about. The security cameras blacked out shortly after I turned the air back on. If she's telling the truth, then...it's possible...but he'd be changed..."
"What the fuck does that mean?"
Static. No response.
Ira fell to her knees, staring at the dried, crimson filth on her hands and the flaking bloodstain she was sitting in.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Its warmth calls to him, reaching around bending, twisting, never-ending pathways and corners. Like the faint remnants of a solar flare at the border of interstellar space. He searches on and on for the source of it all.
His hunger grows more and more insatiable with each passing moment, growing to fit his new body.
It strikes him that these halls are familiar, that perhaps in another life he knew them.
2
Mathias thrust the lid off of the sensory deprivation tank, screaming for air. Clawing his way out of the tank, the linoleum tiling like ice on his skin.
He could still feel its grip around his throat, twisting, applying just enough pressure to keep him alive, conscious. Proving its point. Somehow, Mathias knew that if the Harvester wanted, it could end his life in the Astral Lands.
The LSD he'd taken before the tank session was still playing tricks on his eyes. A phantasmagoria of light and sound, shapes and patterns, endlessly attempting to distract him from the horror of his situation.
I'm going to die, he thought.
There was no telling when it would happen. The next time he fell asleep, or the time after? Maybe even after that?
Unless he could find a replacement.
Now.
He attempted to stand; the pain bunched up in his throat like he'd swallowed a bag full of needles.
The warding symbol, the eye of the abyss, spun around him. He thought of the beast it had been designed to keep Weber safe from. He'd seen its pulsing gray eyes just hours ago, both in the corner of this very chamber and the cell where he kept the others. It seemed to be watching them all, studying them. But, why?
If Weber was right about it, if it had indeed dragged most of his five hundred staffers off to some otherworldly place, why hadn't it attacked them yet?
Does a predator hunt when it isn't hungry? he asked himself.
It was the Harvester's fault.
If he'd had more time...he’d been so close to getting through to the entity. So close to having his answers. The key to the final experiment.
He remembered how he had felt his nose migrate down to his stomach in the tank, how he’d questioned why human beings needed bodies at all as his essence rose up into the atmosphere. The mountains and the ice were no longer visible, but he could tell he was leaving, could feel his essence pass through the Van Allen radiation belts, past the moon,
beyond Jupiter, the rings of Saturn, and even beyond Pluto and Charon. Stars rushed past his eyes, out to that familiar system near Betelgeuse. There, at last, the glowing, nebulous, orange entity was waiting for him. Was this the same entity that Weber and Lilly had conversed with?
No. And maybe. They were all connected somehow.
The last time he'd met with this thing, it had reached out to him willingly. Now, however, it was resistant, maybe even hostile.
Mathias felt the luminous cloud studying him, studying his very core.
As before, his words didn't work in this place, in this form.
Images flashed before his mind's eye. Thousands of them. One element remained constant. The central core of the facility.
In one image, he sees researchers climbing into vertical sensory deprivation tanks—coming up from circular slots in the floor. In the next, he sees their bodies liquefy from inside the tank. Then, there are more researchers, alterations made to the tanks, occult symbols painted on them. Another test, resulting in a fate worse than death for the subjects inside.
He sees them transform into hideous creatures, their faces melting into an expanding biomass that was part human, and part something else...
More images flash into his mind.
He sees more alterations being made to the tanks in the core chamber. Substitute symbols, complex equations written and rewritten on whiteboards, Weber slaving for days on the tiniest details before the final experiment is set to take place.
The final experiment.
Weber himself standing naked before the tanks with surviving colleagues.
A single woman stands before them. She's holding the grimoire in her hand, threatening Weber with its secrets.
Weber disrobes and descends into the tank, not at all concerned with the girl.
The creature charges across the chamber toward the girl. It's almost twenty feet long, its teeth snatch the girl up, and with its meal in its maw, it plunges into a portal to another world. The girl's hand slams into the wall at the last moment. She drops the grimoire and a fire extinguisher. Mathias's eyes trace their trajectory as they fall beneath one of the consoles.
That must be where I found them before, he thinks.
Mathias's vision doesn't end there. He sees the girl get dragged into the Astral Lands.
The ground is the color of sand and has the texture of leathery skin. He sees mouths opening and closing across a vast and infinite horizon, and at the horizon, he sees that familiar, cancerous gray sky trail above him.
The ground is littered with the decaying bodies of hundreds of men and women, some wearing torn jumpsuits and tattered lab coats.
The creature sits atop its new meal, who is still somehow alive in that terrible place, clawing at the sky and ground alike. The creature watches the girl's movements with what Mathias thinks of as a form of amusement before it opens its mouth, releasing the body from its maw.
The body falls to the leathery ground, where a mouth opens up and swallows the remains of the girl's body. The creature stalks away, sitting atop a leathery hill before that terrible, pulsing gray sky, paying little notice to how the land has eaten the rest of its meal.
Then it regards him, and it seems to be charging at the instant before he's yanked back through the portal, the event horizon.
Within the core, he can see what the remaining three saw, what they visualized inside their tanks: another world, another version of Earth, a new home—then he sees them vanish, and there are no other images.
But not before he hears them chanting. Something that is at once familiar to him and completely alien. Something which echoes through their very souls across the fabric of time and space.
“Aml'cath na ule'th ada hote' tekke.”
His view of the planetary system, of the luminous entity, returned.
He tried to ask the entity if the researchers had succeeded, if it could show him the other world. A vision of a Rubik's Cube suggested that they didn't know, or, the answer was unknowable.
Maybe this presence wasn't like the previous one he'd dealt with? What if the entity was just a man? A man belonging to a race of aliens who were far more advanced than humanity?
A man and his daughter playing in a park, a woman jogging by them while listening to music, animals running free, rivers and forests, mountains, humans living in harmony with nature, with science. The image fades quickly with a pang of regret and longing left in its absence.
Yes, Mathias thought. It is. The risk is worthwhile. It is!
The entity started to circle his essence. He sees an image of Nico's body on the floor of his cell, then Hugo lying beaten and broken on the floor of the cell hours later.
The feelings he got from the entity were anything but good ones. Perhaps it was trying to shame his actions? Trying to make him feel remorse for the steps he'd taken to ensure the survival of his species?
No, he thought. You are a fool. Humans are not so easily persuaded to hedge their bets on a thing like this, especially when success isn't promised.
He sees the images of the Hiroshima and Nagasakie explosions, the thousands dead and dying in Nazi death camps, soldiers storming a local hospital in San Bernardino, opening fire on recovering Revolutionist soldiers, and the deployment of Measure 86 on Revolutionist forces as they sleep unawares.
This is different, he thought. You wouldn't...you wouldn't understand. My species is almost gone...extinct...
He sees a static image of the Harvester's hooded form, the mask's expression twisting into a hideous grin, showing ancient, carved teeth.
A moment later, and it seems as if the Harvester's appendages are reaching, clawing for him.
The images ceased and the entity retreated back to its glowing orange world.
Mathias's essence lingered for a time, pleading with the entity to tell him the answer.
It seemed to pause for a moment. He could feel it deliberating with an answer.
Yes! Tell me!
That was when he felt a twisting around his neck, pulling him through time and space to that other place. His body felt as though it would shatter into thousands of pieces as it slammed into the dusty surface of a familiar moon.
The Harvester's mask was frowning at him. Its grip was tightening. Lifting him into the air.
He was screaming. He felt like he was drowning. The warning was clear.
That's when he woke.
When he was permitted to.
The colors were still dancing across his vision. He could see patterns in the linoleum, something he hadn't noticed before. The pyramid formation now danced before his eyes, stunning, and in three dimensions he could make out every detail, and at which point the opposite-facing pyramids became one. Their union was proportional, perfect, and seemed to have some otherworldly quality to it.
The eye of the abyss.
He stood there for an eternity, staring, considering the pattern, the symbol, and the meaning of the formation. The symbol was all over the grimoire. Weber believed that it was a warding symbol meant to keep lesser creatures like the Amarath at bay.
If his younger self could see him now, he'd balk at the things he was doing, researching, believing.
He peeled his eyes off of the dancing eye of the abyss and followed the shifting patterns on the floor that led to Mathias's bed.
Standing before the bed, he found himself fighting with himself, fighting with his body's intense desire to collapse into its soft embrace. The death of stars and galaxies took place in the span of time it took him to give in, to feel the sheets on his skin, to crawl beneath the blankets and shut the doorways to his brain and allow the darkness to finally take him.
His eyes were half-closed when he thought of the Harvester. Its enlarged appendage wrapped around his neck, constricting.
It was too real; he couldn't breathe.
No!
He sat up in the bed, tossing the blankets off of himself.
I can't sleep! I have to find a substitute!
> His clothes were neatly draped over the back of a chair. He put them on haphazardly and made his way down to the experiment chamber where he'd kept Eddy.
He'd been trying to isolate what had caused the last attempt to fail, and so far he'd had no luck. He'd been over the symbols again and again, repainted them, rearranged them, and still he was no closer to understanding.
Maybe there was nothing to understand. Maybe the madness in these things was that there was no coming to understand them. That they were all at the mercy of forces they could never hope to control.
I am twice the scientist that Weber was, he thought, shaking his head. I will succeed, I will unlock this mystery!
Still. Even if this attempt failed, he could just try it on Ira or Lena. As long as one of them survived, things would work out.
There was no time for further deliberation.
3
He feels he's getting close. The waves crashing into his body are stronger than they were in the chamber of his birth, feeding his hunger.
But, there's something else now too. It's like...music.
Yes. Music!
They're like voices, chanting, pained and yet somehow beautiful to his malformed ears. They prove to be enough of a distraction from his hunger that he turns and starts moving in their direction.
Lumbering through corridors and hallways, searching rooms where the singing seems to be strongest, clawing open vents and doorways.
He finds himself in front of the elevator. His fingers reach out, the bones sinking into the crack in the doorway, shadows gripping, tearing the metal to shreds, ripping it away.
The shredded, metallic pieces of the doorway clack and clank in the hallway until they lie still.
He stands before the darkness. The singing seems to be coming from below, in the dark at the bottom of the elevator shaft. Then he's falling through the dark. The way he fell before.
There is little pain when his body hits the bottom. His body is a puddle of shadow, ash, and crumbling flesh.
There is a cable stabbing through what's left of his skull.
He tears it free.
Blood and tar drip from the wound. Clawing for support, he notices that he's missing fingers. Something is growing in their place, shadows reaching, extending past where bone and flesh once were. Soon there won't be much flesh left in him. The thought is at once welcome and terrifying.
Mind's Horizon Page 24