Empty plains of flesh.
He picked up his pace over the skin of the desert landscape. He could sense where he needed to go, the next patient, and it was taking too long to get there. It was like walking down a dark alley in the city, you do it quickly while being filled with anticipation of danger.
After another nervous scan of his surroundings, Athan saw it.
A figure.
He stopped dead in his tracks and stared at the figure standing near some ridged hills to his far left maybe four hundred or so metres away.
Athan had never seen anyone here before. The figure appeared to be man sized and dark with a pale face. Maybe this was some kind of entity that he hadn’t seen yet?
Or maybe this was a thing from the deeper plane.
The deeper plane was a place he had only seen twice before. Once he had stumbled across a door in an odd structure that had formed in the landscape.
It was a different kind of doorway in a person’s mind.
Something Athan had never seen before.
It was like an access point to a darker level of the communal subconscious. It was like a vacuum into dead space. This deeper gate had filled him with curiosity and fear because he wasn’t sure if he could enter this other plane and find a way out again. Plus he felt that there was something alive inside it. He had not seen anything, but he had felt its presence in the void.
Could this being be the one he had felt?
The figure on the ridge turned and left. It disappeared somewhere, maybe through an exit, maybe into a tunnel under the desert.
It left Athan with a chill.
He took a deep breath and tried to focus. He needed to find the next patient, Kendra Thompson.
***
The dark basement had an eerie bluish glow coming through the tiny dusty window.
The moonlight made the basement look like a torture chamber. It was filled with a whole range of pipes, girders and old rotten furniture. There were also reels of wire and shelves of dusty tools.
Unlike most dank and musty basements though, this one was metaphysical and went on as far as Athan could see, with all kinds of corners and alcoves.
The little girl standing in front of him was Kendra Thompson.
She looked about eight or nine, but in the physical world she was closer to fifty-eight. The woman had been in a car accident in the town of Hamilton a month before. Now she was number three on the second list of four people that Dr Enstein had provided him with.
Kendra was not hard to locate in her mindscape.
She was calling out for help from down a dark corridor in the endless basement, where she hid from her mother who hated her for letting her older sister run away with a boy.
At least this was what she had told Athan so far.
“She blames me!” Kendra wailed as she leaned against one of the dusty grey walls. “She said you aren’t to let her go near Nathan Teely! And I didn’t watch her! I was just looking at the shoes on the on shelf and she disappeared!”
Athan stood over the girl with his hands in his pockets like a schoolteacher at his wit’s end.
“Well,” he began calmly, “firstly your mother was not blaming you. She didn’t mean that. You are…your age and your sister was fifteen. She came home the next day Kendra, you know that, and she got in all kinds of trouble.”
The girl stared up at him blankly.
“But Mum said she can’t go near Nathan Teely!” she cried.
This was not working. There were no objects specifically that led him to any real conclusions.
No subconscious clues.
Some individuals latched onto experiences and situations rather than objects to form their memories. At least that was true according to his experiences. And so far it was proving true for this case too.
He let himself slip to the floor and leaned back against the wall beside the girl. They both stared off into the dark space in silence. The only sound was the occasional dripping of some far away pipes.
“What is up with this Nathan guy?” Athan began as he rubbed at his eyes in frustration. “Was he a douche bag or something? Why was your Mum so against your sister being near him?”
“He was okay, pretty nice actually, and cute. Mum just didn’t like us being with boys. She had my sister when she was seventeen,” she said, sounding honest and a little mature.
“Did Nathan and your sister have a relationship then?” Athan needed some clues. All he had was a name on a list.
“Yeah, sort of.” A cut off answer.
Progress.
About bloody time.
“So why did you girls see him at the mall? Was it an accident?” Athan rested his elbows on his knees.
“Kinda…” Kendra said shrugging and sitting down beside him.
Athan examined her pointed features in profile. “Your sister knew he’d be there didn’t she Kendra?”
She turned her head and looked up at him dark, knowing eyes. “We both did.”
“Both? You knew? Why didn’t you try to get her to walk with you to another shopping centre? She could have got distracted in another store or something…” He shrugged.
“I wanted to see him too…” Kendra’s cold blue eyes sparkled with tears.
“Pardon?”
This girl’s not holding back at all.
She looked the same, but she was sounding more like an adult.
“I loved him too. I wanted to see him, I didn’t know he would run away with Selima!” she said through gritted teeth.
“But you said your mother was worried about him being around your sister, you knew this was going to happen.” Athan raised his eyebrows and looked baffled.
One name left after this. Come on, Come on.
Athan was quickly growing tired of trying to solve these human jigsaw puzzles. He had never really had a lot of experience with relationships, and as far as emotions went, he was the poster boy for ‘man is an island’. So his emotional isolation didn’t really give him the edge when trying to free these people from their own minds.
“I still wanted to see him! I loved him!” she said.
“You were far too young for Nathan. He couldn’t love you, you were a child!” Athan pleaded.
“I wasn’t always this young…” She said with gravity beyond her age.
The change startled Athan slightly, seeing as these coma patients were so young in mind and body when they were trapped in their subconscious, this girl was making her own fight to return. “He married Selima you know? When she was twenty one, I was 17…”
He began to put things together; this basement was here for a reason.
She was giving him clues.
The place was symbolic, that’s why there were no significant objects.
“Shall we walk, Kendra?” he suggested. “Is that ok?”
The girl nodded solemnly.
Athan pulled himself up off the dusty floor and brushed the back of his pants out of habit, even though he knew this was all metaphysical.
He held out his hand so Kendra could take it and she awkwardly got to her feet and straightened her floral dress and patted the dust off her pale grey stockings. The little girl held on to his hand as they strolled through the eerie darkness. “Kendra,” Athan said, looking at the dank surroundings. “What is this place?”
“The basement at Mum’s old house. Selima and I used to play down here sometimes when Mum was angry at us.” She smiled at the memory.
“Was she often angry?” Athan decided to ask.
It could be a clue.
“No. Well…maybe.” The girl tilted her head thoughtfully. “When we were teenagers we liked to sneak out to parties, that made her mad. And I guess the three of us just got in each other’s way when we lived together. When we got jobs and Selima moved out we got along a lot better.”
Athan nodded.
The pair kept strolling down the corridor, passing work benches, tools, power leads and water pipes. Until they came upon a place against a w
all where two bottoms had been sitting in the dust.
They were back where they had started.
“Is this a special place for you Kendra?” Athan said looking back the way they had come.
“Hmmm…not really.” Kendra shrugged.
“But something must have happened here.”
Kendra wiped a tear from her cheek before sitting down on her place on the floor.
Athan sat down again with her.
“Something…” Kendra whispered.
The girl squinted as she gazed off into space.
She’s remembering.
“Is that why we’re here? What happened in the basement Kendra?” This must have been the key.
Athan felt relief; he could feel that the scenario was beginning to fit together.
“Just before they got married, he followed me down here…” she said, tilting her head again in that thoughtful way.
“What happened?”
She looked up at him innocently with tear filled eyes, and then looked at the dusty floor.
She took a deep wavering breath.
“He told me he’d always liked me, and we kissed. It was amazing.” She lifted her eyes to the wall.
A look of shame fell over her.
“After that I told Selima that he loved me and that I loved him. She got angry and hit me.” Tears ran freely down her cheeks. “Nathan denied everything and said that I had approached him and forced myself on him. Which she believed, because Nathan couldn’t do anything wrong, and she knew that I had always had a soft spot for him. I was an idiot.”
She covered her face with her hands.
Athan tipped his head back and rubbed at his rough chin. Thinking about how to respond sensitively.
“Well that’s an intrigue and a half,” he said tactlessly.
The environment hadn’t changed.
She wasn’t free yet.
“Then why are we here?” he asked, almost at a loss. He was growing impatient again. Every step closer felt like a small victory, but the game went on and he needed to keep playing.
I hate games. Why do human minds have to be a mish-mash composition of every board game I ever sucked at…
“Because twelve years later I married him after they had a divorce.” She uncovered her eyes. “And he’s a bastard and my sister won’t speak to me.”
Athan cringed. Like sands through the hour glass…
“And…it’s all because I was a selfish little girl that never grew up.” She closed her eyes and tears rolled down her cheeks.
Suddenly there was stillness.
The dripping of pipes stopped.
And then things began to disappear.
At last.
As she faded away and the world became a void once again he noticed a door. There was a ripple in the mindscape, like a vacuum.
Someone had been watching the whole situation like a TV drama, drawing from it, feeding.
Athan became uneasy.
He hated being watched.
And the presence had malevolence to it.
This was one of those doors to the deeper plane, a world within a world within a world, and it felt like it was unhealthy, like a parasite.
Athan tightened his black tie as he decided what to do.
He needed to know what it was that made him feel so uncomfortable, he wanted to understand why it made him feel the way it did.
Athan drifted towards the ripple in the black mindscape, ready to recoil quickly if he needed to. It was like sliding into water, submerging your face in a pool with a held breath.
It was cool to the touch.
As he pushed himself through and felt a tingle pass over his skin like goose bumps and a pressure like deep water.
It reminded him of when he was thirteen and swimming competitively for his year level at school. After winning a race he felt invincible and decided he would swim to the bottom of the diving pool. It was five metres deep, not much to a teenager, so he pulled himself deeper and deeper, but it was always out of reach, just that little bit too far. Finally he was within an arm’s length of it and it felt like someone was squeezing his head with their fingers in his ears.
It was the pressure. It was unbearable, and he had to give up and burst back to the surface for a breath.
This was how it felt now, like diving into that pool again, the door felt thick and syrupy, like he was moving in slow motion.
Then the other side was in view.
He beheld a scene of hell.
A greenish glowing sun lit another bony, fleshy landscape, but unlike the empty one he was familiar with, this one was swarming with activity. There was no endless fog concealing the details of this landscape, it was overrun with an endless ocean of crawling things of all shapes and sizes. Many of them stood like men, like soldiers standing at duty in their thousands. Their blank heads reminded him of the faceless figure he saw standing next to the ridge after he freed Mr Li.
Droves of man sized beings with no faces.
He felt the pressure build until it was too much for him and he felt out of breath. He needed to turn around and escape back to the rippled entrance. If he didn’t, he would drown.
The pressure threatened to crush his body.
It was like a dream, the closest thing Athan had had to experiencing the helplessness of a nightmare. The more he fought to retrace his steps, the more he felt like he was drifting toward the Hell World in front of him.
Finally there was a kind of traction.
His hand passed through the goose bump sensation of the doorway, and he summoned all the strength he could to pull the rest of his body through. At last his view of the deeper plane began to fade and shrink, he was now alone in the cold emptiness of Kendra Thompson’s subconscious.
He closed his eyes a moment to recall the horrifying scene.
It was the closest he had come to the deeper plane. It must be some kind of a glitch, some kind of mindscape crossover.
And the creatures?
Surely they were some kind of creation of someone’s mind, or his? Had he discovered his own subconscious? This needed more thought, and he needed to get out and back to the safety of the plane he knew, or the physical plane.
***
Athan stepped out of a forty-seven year old man having a cigarette in the Ballarat Base Hospital car park.
He took a deep breath of the cool Ballarat air, and said a polite greeting to the smoking man, who had not noticed the man in the suit approach.
Then Athan began marching toward the gate and the street that would take him down to the lake.
He knew that up there, in the hospital ward David Li and Kendra Thompson would wake up from their comas.
Two more patients freed from their internal imprisonment.
Oh, crap…
As if from nowhere, Athan’s crippling headache spread again in his brain.
“Aah, dammit. What the hell!” He rubbed at his temples.
This was not the first time he had left a patient with a migraine, but they seemed to be getting worse, and he still had two more patients on the list.
He needed to sit down and have a dim sim and some water with a healthy dose of painkillers before he would be able to tackle number three.
Chapter 5
IN THE HIDDEN bunker in Ballarat’s industrial south, Belinda was making a cup of coffee for Brad and herself. She had white with two sugars and Brad had white with a teaspoon of honey.
“I’ll have one,” Athan said from behind her, “white with three, or honey, I’m not fussed, and a pain killer. Make that two.”
Belinda jumped with fright and the milk splashed over her mug and all over the bench.
Athan had used her mind as his conduit to reach Brad.
“Holy crap!” Belinda leant forward over the bench, gripping the edge, facing away from Athan. “You asshole! Don’t do that!”
She turned and shoved him in the chest.
Athan just smiled apologetically.
�
��Were you in my head just now? Stay out of there, it makes me feel violated!” she looked more annoyed than frightened. “Brad told me how you disappeared last time! It’s weird, and kinda freaks me out.”
Athan held up his hands defensively.
“Sorry. It’s faster than walking, and I’m always in a hurry,” he lied.
He actually liked frightening people occasionally; it made him feel like he existed on this plane.
Belinda covered her eyes with her hand and tried to calm down.
“What is going on?” Brad’s voice rang out from out in the main room.
“It’s me Brad,” Athan answered as he watched Belinda clumsily make his coffee. Her eyes were dark and vacant, as she tried to make sense of something that should be impossible.
“Here, white with three. I wish you wouldn’t do that to me,” she said.
“Thank you,” Athan said, warming his hands with the hot mug. “I’ll try not to Belinda.”
“Here are some pills for the pain.” She handed him the two tablets. “Why can’t you jump out of his head? He’s probably used to it.”
Athan shook his head. “I can’t use Brad, he’s like me. I don’t know why I can’t, but that’s just the way it is.”
She leaned back on the kitchen bench.
She wasn’t angry anymore; she was just a little annoyed. Athan’s ability was new to her and challenging to comprehend.
“What if I was in the shower or something?” She shook her head. “Are you going to keep visiting us now? Am I going to be your permanent front door to Bradland?”
Athan smiled and shrugged. “Well, you’d just have to dry my clothes again. Also I don’t visit anyone regularly, especially people like me. It’s not safe.”
Belinda nodded toward the main room. “He’s in the lounge watching his TVs. Bring him his coffee, would you?”
“Thank you again, Belinda. And I’m sorry about giving you a fright.”
She waved him off and gave him a slight smile.
“Sleepwalker, old boy! Welcome back! What’s up? I’m sure you wouldn’t make social visits.” Brad greeted Athan from the lounge.
He sat in a grey woolen jumper and his brown shoulder length hair was hanging like a curtain over his face as he read.
The Post-Humans (Book 1): The League Page 6