by Troy McCombs
A light flashed inside Jennifer's head. Her eyes lit up, as if she was onto something. "I watched this show on Discovery a while back, about outer-space. They talked about the birth and dying of stars. If they burn when they're alive, then implode into themselves once they die..."
John nodded with a smile. "They create a black hole. That's what it is! There is a small-scale black hole there—in the Mayberry House! However, it doesn't act like a black hole in space, not exactly. It doesn't just suck in surrounding matter. Only certain things can enter and leave. That's why D'kourikai has power limited to the particular area. It's not fully open yet..."
"At least, not until the entity—"
"Needs me," he finished her sentence. "When all hell breaks loose. If we don't stop it, not only will it consume our world, but it will consume every world therein."
"Wait, what about ghosts? The spirit world?"
John shook his head doubtfully. "I don't know. But I know that It knows about the spirit world somehow. It made an indirect reference to it that I didn't understand 'till later. However, if it can trap the disembodied Prestillion family, along with other beings, it may be able to trap and destroy pretty much anything."
Jennifer didn't look hopeful, but she stared at the triple pyramids the way a child does a brand new toy. She thought she could feel energy vibrating from the one closest to her, like the rim of a wine glass being stroked by a moist finger. She wanted to touch it so badly, the desire was almost overwhelming. John could see it in her eyes.
"Later. We will come back to it. Then you can see for yourself what really exists in the cracks between life." John went his own way, pushing past her, the luminosity of his glow stick growing gradually weaker. He seemed to be in a hurry, on a mission, not knowing where to go next. Some information had presented itself, but not enough to fill his appetite. There were so many scattered papers covering the floor, the desks, and the file cabinets, that it would have likely taken decades just to read them all.
A hand fell on his shoulder. He jumped, spun around.
"Easy, chief. It's just me." Jennifer offered him a comforting smile. "Too much literature, isn't it?"
Had she read his mind? He thought about that—his mind—and knew he had to gain control of it. How else was he going to weed through all the stained papers lying around? Actually read them? Just the thought of it was daunting. Detailed information could have been separated from each other over the years. Some could be missing. In any case, he had to start somewhere.
He took a deep breath. Doing so, gave him a spontaneous idea. He went with it.
Closing his eyes, John looked at the darkness behind his eyelids, and into the oblivion of his own self-consciousness. He cleared his mind, eased his body, his limbs, his heart rate. His breaths become slower, more natural, longer. He was concentrating, meditating, searching the room psychically for the X spot he needed to find.
I need to find out more about the experiment, he thought, about Prestillion, and his reason for creating the rip in space.
As he used his intuition to probe the room, Jennifer simply looked down and saw a thick stack of papers bound together by brass fasteners. The cover read simply: The Jarsky Project. Oddly, it appeared newer than the other documents, so she reached down and picked it up.
A strange feeling washed over Rollings. He felt close to certain truth when Jennifer placed her hand on his shoulder a second time.
He opened his eyes, turned, and looked down at the thick manuscript in her hands. Not only did it say The Jarsky Project in big, fat, bold letters under the heading; in much smaller print, it read: Final Analysis.
Was this it? Had Jennifer stumbled upon it? Or had John's clarity of thought brought her to it?
She threw open the first page. The cover ripped.
"Easy!"
"Sorry, sorry!" She licked her lips and read the interior. "I think this is it! I think we found it. Listen to this...
"'The Jarsky Project is a top secret experiment that may be a breakthrough not only in science, but in universal truth. It calls for the disintegration of specially designed atoms which are not naturally occurring but are man-made. This consists of a new gaseous element, void of carbon and infused with strong protonic particles and plasmic ions. Though it is technically gaseous, the properties of the substance act, look, and feel like liquid. It has enough energetic potential in one single gram to power a small country for weeks. It has many possible uses; however, it is exceedingly expensive to produce. One gram costs in excess of one-hundred-thousand dollars.'
"'We have tested it in ships, boats, and locomotives, and the effect is stable in each one. The chemical properties change very little with every experiment. It acts as a monumental energy source that never wears out and never converts to other forms of matter. But if we can change it, we believe we can do the impossible: uncover a co-existing world wrapped within the interior of this one, a possible extra-dimensional plane of life where the threshold of physical matter can't currently dwell. I, along with five colleagues, believe we can open up a door to the spirit realm, which some of them don't believe exists. Someplace like heaven, you might even say.'" Jennifer looked up at John, mouth ajar. "Heaven?" Her voice quivered. "Just heaven?"
"Hmm. Well," he shrugged his shoulders, "maybe that was his intention. The man who tried to cure headaches with Nitroglycerin blew himself up. He created the first real explosive. You shoot for the stars, sometimes you end up underground. Read on."
She did. "'Whether the experiment works or not, only time will tell. We are finalizing the design of the pyramid, which is the key, and the silver sphere, which is the door. Both are made from previously unknown, man-made metals, and both possess great strength and highly magnetic fields beyond the scope of anything ever tested. These, set vertically at the precise distance apart, via connection with this new element housed in tubing, should create, in itself, a peculiar omni-directional force of intense energy thus far undiscovered by man.'" Jennifer stopped to catch her breath, then turned the page.
"Vertically..." John rubbed his chin, thinking. "At the precise distance apart?" He took the drawing out of his pocket, opened it up, and read. "'Savior, look down, look up'. I think that is what he was trying to tell us. We're the saviors. They're counting on us to save them."
Jennifer scratched her head. "As soon as I entered that house, I felt an uncanny and overwhelming sense that something vital was upstairs."
"As did I. We know that the key is downstairs."
"The attic...it looked completely opposite from the downstairs—even the upstairs hallway, for that matter. It was much cleaner and smelled like new."
"Look down, look up. The portal is open...in the attic!" John felt the puzzle pieces finally coming together. "The house is just the conductor."
"But why his house and not a laboratory?"
"Cause his family died in that house! Something about poisoning. Carbon…Monoxide?"
"Before or after the Jarksy Project?" She pushed.
"It has to have been before. Why else would you even want to rip open a path to the spirit world? If your whole family died in a house that you built for them and you inadvertently killed them by building it over some underground pipeline, what would you do? Especially if you were a genius like Charles Prestillion?
"What if he knew his family was forever trapped inside that house as ghosts? As souls bound to earth because they died before their real time? Maybe he couldn't live without them and wanted to see them and communicate with them again. Psychic energy like that doesn't just go away, it stays around forever. That's gotta be why he built it there and not here, in some warehouse."
"'Feel up, fall down', the paper says!" Jennifer's gross realization was evident in her excited voice. "Feel up would mean his connection to his family, to heaven. Wanting to feel close to them again. Fall down would mean it didn't work—"
"That it came crashing down!" John nodded, red glow stick light illuminating one half of his face, and green, the other. He loo
ked otherworldly, himself.
"Now how do we stop it?"
Just as she finished saying this, a gentle, cool breeze blew in through the broken window, across the room, and passed between both investigators. It stirred papers, threw some around, and did the unexpected. It deliberately flipped through the pages of the manuscript cradled in Jennifer's hands, all the way to one of the last pages in the text.
John and Jennifer looked at each other intently and then down at the explanation under their very noses. The top of the page read: Status: Failure. Under that, everything was written by hand in inked text. John read it fast, nervously.
"'I only meant to unlock the boundaries between earth and heaven; my team and I have unleashed alternate levels of hell—hellish worlds, anyway. There must have been hundreds I've seen in one swift glance. I now have feelings and urges impossible to describe. Human eyes have been concealed from multiple unknown truths since the beginning of time. Now I see why. Horrible things are around us and within us at all times. Some of them can interact with us without our knowing it! I had not foreseen this in the beginning and cannot end it anytime during my life. There are realms beyond heaven, earth, and hell. There are life forms like us, and life forms I dare not mention, or else I could die. I will die soon. It told me I would. This thing named D'kourikai has my family. He collects their souls, collects many souls. Soon it will have mine. There's nothing I can do. I was so obsessed with reuniting with my deceased family that I'd overlooked every danger imaginable. I've opened Pandora's Box. All my colleagues were eaten and burned alive. They had no choice, or chance. I conned them into it, mislead them because of my selfish desires. The hole in the attic of my house is not white like I'd expected, it's black. Void of anything holy. The only thing I can do now is wait. D'kourikai can see me, has a hold of me wherever I go, and is with whomever I commune. Oh no...I feel him coming! He's closing in on me. I have to finish this. Fast! If anyone reads this, I just want to say I failed my mission of bringing heaven to earth. There's no way to destroy the experiment technologically, with mortal weapons, or by physical means. However, if this monstrous being is the ultimate embodiment of evil, then only one thing has the power to stop it. Maybe. Something I'm not. And that is the ultimate embodiment of good. Pure life. A mystical mortal with absolute s—'"
Rollings slammed a fist down on the table. "Dammit!"
"What? Absolute what?"
"The S is there, but that's it. After that, it's been marked out."
"Here, let me see." She quickly but carefully looked over the whole page, making note of the spaces between other words and the length and penmanship of each word. Her eyes went from left to right at blinding speed. "Whatever word it is, it's between nine and thirteen letters long. What could that be?"
"That single word could mean the difference between total disaster and closing the portal." John ran a hand nervously through his shaggy hair. A hint of anger burned in his eyes. One was tinted green, the other was tinted red.
"When we get back, I'll go through a dictionary to see if I can find a word that could match."
John nodded, relieved and stressed all at once. The glow sticks were beginning to fizzle out. The luminosity they produced now was barely brighter than two nightlights.
"Look for a word pertaining to a single person."
"What do you make of the reference to mystical mortal?"
He shook his head. "I think mortal means embodied, as in alive, physically. I think mystical means…well, psychics were better known as mystics in those days."
"So that could mean you. Or me?"
John nodded and yawned. He was exhausted. He really didn't have the concrete answer he needed or expected, just more of the usual, childish, beating-around-the-bush hints that, in the end, led him nowhere.
"At least we know for sure what weapon we need to help us," Jennifer said with a smile.
John looked at her, his eyes dormant and glassy.
"A living human being. You, John."
That was the answer he was afraid of. It wasn't that he was frightened of death; it was the fact that if he did die, his soul would be eternally trapped with D'kourikai. He would have failed the entire world...within a world...within a world...within a world.
Chapter 14
The ride back to Ben's was bumpy, tedious, and boring. The houses John gazed at through the passenger-side window as they drove through Bellsville, past Sharton, and toward Lecorrd, flew by in an unseen blur. Red lights turned to green at every intersection, and STOP signs seemed to appear at every corner. John was getting sick of the stop and go routine. But at around six o' clock, right before dusk, the rumbling Blazer pulled up to the curb on Maynor Street after what seemed like two long hours. John got out. “Thanks for the ride back, Jen.”
"I'll call you as soon as I figure out that word. Then we, or you, can defeat D'kourikai once and for all."
"I wish nobody ever came up with that equation. E=MC2. Nothing but trouble."
“Take it easy.” She smiled. In this particular light, during this particular moment, at this particular location, her smile was model-beautiful.
He managed a grin and shut the door. The jeep pulled away.
It was cold out, probably the coldest day thus far since last winter. No higher than fifteen degrees. Tiny, sporadic flakes of snow fell from the sky very slowly. Smoke billowed from the furnaces and fireplaces of almost every nearby residence. The streets were vacant of human life, even working vehicles. Nobody around for miles wanted anything to do with this frigid weather.
John looked up at Ben's rundown house. The shutters were dangling, the gutters broken. Quite a few shingles were missing from the roof. It looked unoccupied, though an upstairs light was on. He knew his friend was home, and unexpectedly felt that his friend was close to a different home, one unexplored by physical eyes. A home only offered to bodiless life forms.
Oh no. Not now. Not today.
A feeling of despair pervaded the psychic as he stood there; looking up at the room his friend was rotting in, probably dying in. His heart ached. He did not want to face him, but knew he must.
He walked up onto the porch, into the house, and into the unoccupied living room, where the television was blaring. The local news was on, and Dana Richardson, a beautiful Latino who always wore a tight, silky, breast-accentuating blouse, was reporting. Her lips moved fast. Her voice resounded slightly slower. She was talking about an issue John did not want to hear—cancer.
I got a bad feeling about Ben.
"Researchers are now seeking what may soon be a new breakthrough against the appearance and long term effects of cancer. Scientist Allen Stapher claims that the cells of cancer patients can be contained via a simple method previously un-thought to have any remedial outcome for any known disease. By—" she continued, but John had heard all he needed to hear.
Jesus, how could I have been so stupid? So naive? So FORGETFUL! I could have saved Ben all this time, and I never put two and two together.
Is it too late? Is he still alive?
John ran into the kitchen, through a short hall, up the stairs, and into Ben's room. The same thought—memory—never fled his mind. It was the day after the United Apartments fire, when he was resting in a hospital bed and had encountered D'kourikai embodied in a nurse. What the beast had told him was now priceless. "You can explain to me how you block the messages I send you. Are you that afraid of them? Aww, your poor mind hurts when they do come through! You tell me that and I can explain to you where cancer REALLY comes from and just how childishly simple it is to cure. See you later, you degenerate!"
How did I not see it till now? John thought to himself. Truth was, his abrupt disconnection from D'kourikai and introduction to the Wolfs bane was the cause. The psychic interruption had hindered certain memories, especially those pertaining to D'kourikai.
Ben was lying on a filthy, blood and shit-stained mattress inside a room more deplorable than the Georn City Dump. The dirtiest-looking clothes c
overed every inch of the floor, cups filled with mold cluttered every desk and nightstand, and plates fastened with stale, leftover food were crawling with maggots. The odors were worse than the sights. John's gag reflex was calling. His stomach was stirring. But his friend was in the center of it all.
He did not look even remotely well. In a sense, it did not even look like the Ben with which John had been friends with for the past several years. He looked like he'd lost twenty pounds in the past couple of days. His milk-colored flesh was taut and the wrinkles on his face made him look fifty instead of twenty-eight. The circles around his eyes were part black, part red. The eyes themselves had only moments of life left in them. He was dying.
John ran to his buddy's bedside and knelt down on a pillow on the floor. There, he grabbed Ben's hands and held them firmly but gently. "I'm here, Ben. I'm here, man."
Ben coughed. It sounded terrible, mucous like, forced, and painful, along with the facial expression that accompanied it.
He looked into John's eyes. “This day's come sooner than I thought. Time just flies by."
Time...
"I can save you, Ben!" John's voice took on a demanding tone. He knew he either had to act now or not at all.
"Save me? From this? No, you can't save me. Nobody can."
"I can't personally, but I know some...thing that can."
Ben smiled. "What? Some ghoul? A poltergeist? Get real, John."
John let go of his hand and slapped the wall. "I'm telling you the truth! I swear on my mother's soul."
Ben swallowed. He'd never heard John swear on his mother without telling the absolute truth. But how could it be?
"Come on!" Hastily, John stood, placed his hands under his friend's body, and tried to help him up.
As he did, Ben reacted violently. He swung his arms, kicked out a leg, and twisted his brittle form. He fell back onto bed, cursing. "What the hell are you doing, John? Goddamn! I'm in enough pain as it is. I don't need you playing hero."
"I'm not having you die on me!" John pointed a trembling finger at him. "You're coming with me whether you like it or not. You're twenty-eight years old!"