by Simon Clark
‘What is it?’ he screamed. ‘WHAT HAVE YOU BROUGHT INTO THE WORLD!’
‘What have I brought into the world?’ Cascades of ice poured down my spine. The red figure in front of me oscillated between good old, friendly Natsaf-Ty, clad in fluttering bandages, to something that I can only think in terms of OTHER. An other life-form not connected with the Earth, nor connected with the time and space of our universe.
The guy with the face rot, my arch enemy, had opened my eyes. I sensed the other-place nature of the red figure. No longer was he the ‘dusty gentleman’ of ancient Egypt. My childhood imagination had shaped the red smear of light that visited me nightly into the mummy, which had become my imaginary friend. In truth, Natsaf-Ty, the museum exhibit, had been exotic, yet familiar enough to form an acceptable shape to represent the ‘thing’ that fell through darkness with us. All the conversations I’d had with him as a boy must have been one-sided. To me they’d seemed real, of course; as real as the child who talks to a toy and fantasizes the toy replies. And yet, those conversations had helped me through dark times. The luminous visitor on the stairs had allowed me to discuss my worries, and then, more beautifully and profoundly than Natsaf-Ty answering my questions, it was me, Mason Konrad, who’d found the answers inside myself. Without knowing it, I’d cultivated wisdom and maturity, together with the mental and emotional apparatus to manage my life. In turn, I guided myself along the sometimes dangerous road from being a child to becoming an adult. And before these catastrophic events, a happy, well-balanced adult at that.
Meanwhile, this fall through darkness. A fall in the company of a pillar of red light that grew taller, that penetrated the void beneath our feet. The red pillar was becoming a glowing filament, which ran through the body of the universe. We, the Echomen and I, rode along it; a pulse of thought along a blood-red nerve.
The one with the ruinous face screamed, ‘How did you do this to us!’
Vertigo’s grip on me began to ease. When I spoke it was calmly. ‘Imagine a child who has been deserted. He’s alone. He sits on a wall beside a busy highway. Cars stream by, thousands of cars, millions of them, all speeding by in a blur. Eventually a driver might notice the abandoned child and stop. At that moment the child doesn’t know whether the driver’s intentions are good or evil. Now imagine a child who is broken-hearted, who knows his family is disintegrating, that his mother is close to suicide. Visualize the child sitting on the top step of a flight of stairs at midnight. Now picture this: in our universe, radioactive particles are falling through our bodies all the time, things like gamma rays and electrons. Imagine that riding this stream of radiation, like cars use a road, are beings with minds. In all their millions riding through our world, isn’t it possible one might notice an unhappy boy or girl and stop?’
‘But is that to help or cause harm?’ His face was a picture of horror. ‘Have you let something into this world that will destroy us?’
‘Us?’ I shook my head. ‘You mean your kind. The Echomen.’
‘No. All of us. I’m talking about the death of life on earth! Mason! Haven’t you seen what it is yet?’
The figure had elongated to a red line that threaded itself through the blackness of the abyss into which we descended at incredible speed. Above us the luminous ribbon of light appeared to have no end, and when I looked down beneath us it curved away into the darkness, growing more and more slender until I could see it no more. The group of men and women who wore my face sped along the crimson strand that I’d once thought of as Natsaf-Ty, my humble imaginary friend who would listen with such rapt attention as he sat on his customary third step from the bottom. Back then I’d tell him how I stood up in class to read from The Catcher in the Rye as my best friend pulled faces until I couldn’t speak for laughing. Or I’d solemnly ask the old gentleman’s advice about girls, or confess that I was afraid about going on the school’s camping expedition.
No, I hadn’t understood the true nature of my not-so imaginary friend. I looked into the scared eyes that were a replica of mine in the ruined face. ‘I haven’t seen what he is yet,’ I told him. ‘But I know this: soon we’ll find out.’
‘What have you done, Mason? What have you done?’
The huddle of Echomen appeared to ripple as terror crackled through them like a wave of energy. They ducked their heads. Eyes stared wide into the burning pillar of light that grew steadily brighter as we fell … not through the universe but through the spaces in-between … between the atoms … my mind whirled as vertigo took hold again, sending pulses of sensation through me that made me so dizzy I could barely see.
Then out.
Out across the face of an alien world whose landscape of spiked rock thrust from the ground like the spines of a sea urchin. Purple clouds swirled round the needle-like columns of stone. Above us, twin suns revolved around each other.
Being so near to the red twine that was flung across the abyss saved me. It created a nexus of protection that spared me from the vacuum, the heat of the sun, the withering ordnance of radiation that must have seared these worlds. However, the creatures that we called Echomen began to die. The withering heat took them; I watched as they opened their mouths and screamed not sound but atomized droplets of blood from ruptured lungs. From dozens of mouths gusted clouds of scarlet vapour. Then, as suddenly, a killing cold replaced the heat. Blood particles jetting from their mouths became vermilion snowflakes. The zone of destruction crept closer to where I stood beside the red cord. Dozens more were obliterated by temperatures that were cold enough to liquefy the air in their throats. A tongue in one of the creature’s heads turned into a hard, black mass. Expressions of pain and terror became fixed on their faces. Hands darkened then shattered. Gradually, faces caved in on themselves – a slow-motion implosion as soft, moist tissues inside the heads contracted as body temperatures plunged to absolute zero.
Meanwhile, the journey continued through a sea of golden lights that might have been fireballs or even entire galaxies. I had no sense of dimension. The red line along which we flashed like thought along a nerve might have been as thick as a girl’s waist or might have exceeded the circumference of our Sun. So what may have been a mist of photons could equally have been silver dust motes or another field of stars, each with planets that contained life. More worlds rolled beneath us. One awash with a yellowish ocean in which strangely human faces floated. They looked up with eyes the size of islands as we flowed by, high above the surface. In those eyes beneath smooth foreheads that were as broad as prairies I saw the light of intelligence; call it intuition, but I sensed they knew something of my life and my world.
Then they were gone. By the light of a blue star I saw that the group of surviving Echomen numbered about a hundred. These were the ones closest to the red column, that nexus of protection from the hostile elements that ached to rob us of our lives. Even so, those copies of me were all damaged. Either by heat or by cold. Bare skin had blistered, lips were blackened by frostbite, they panted as their lungs suffered from exposure to toxic gases, radiation burst blood vessels under their skin to form strange random tattoos. Hair fell from heads like trees shedding dead leaves in the fall.
A woman stumbled to her knees. She held out her arms toward me so I could help her rise again. The moment I took hold of her two hands in mine the skin slid off them like a pair of gloves; a second later she died. Whatever protected me from the lethal forces also ejected the detritus. Instantly she was flung into such heat her body turned into a smear of vapour.
The man with the ruined copy of my face spoke. ‘There’s nothing you can do to save us now. For that matter your own kind. Don’t you realize you created a bridge to our planet from this? Twenty years ago you invited this … DEATH into our world.’
By now, heat and cold had taken its toll on the man. His lips turned blue; he had difficulty in breathing as if the intense heat surge had scorched his lung tissue. When he raised his hand to touch his injured face I saw his fingertips had turned black; what�
�s more, his nails had begun to flake off from the flesh. Frost formed in the deep crater in his cheek. Ice crystals twinkled there in the light of the blue star. At last the panic left his eyes; that went for the others, too. Instead, they’d become passive; they calmly accepted that their destruction wasn’t far away.
He moved his head to indicate something in the distance toward which we hurtled. ‘Not far now. Can you feel it?’ A ghost of a smile reached his mouth. ‘You’ve nearly reached your destination … or should that be destiny?
The red line along which we glided now had an ending. This sinuous filament entered a globe that glowed with the same luminous red. For a while it grew only gradually in size then suddenly it expanded into a vast body that filled my field of vision. Once inside we seemed to fall by other entire worlds. A globe lined with valleys passed beneath us. The valleys were filled with mist, and through the vapour dark shapes swam. And often we didn’t so much as bypass worlds as fall through their centres. Cold, poison gas, heat, they all stripped more Echomen away from the edge of the group. Disintegrating bodies tumbled away, dwindling our group to little more than twenty.
In this red world we moved more and more slowly until we stopped, suspended in a ruby light.
The man with the ruined face had grown weaker; his shoulders sagged under their own weight. By will-power alone he managed to remain standing as he regarded me. ‘Tell me now, Mason, what is it you’re thinking? When you look out there, do you see what I see?’
‘They say that before the universe existed there were only two states of reality. Here and now. Space didn’t exist so there wasn’t an “over there”, or a “behind you”, or an “up above”. Time didn’t exist. So there was only “now”. You couldn’t have a past so there was no history. Back then, everything that occurred happened all at once and in the same place.’ I blinked. ‘When I was a boy I pictured the … what do you call it? Entity? A figure? That doesn’t seem an adequate description any more, does it?’ I took a deep breath. ‘Anyway, my mind construed this red “appearance” as an Egyptian mummy by the name of Natsaf-Ty. It seems almost homely now. A three-thousand-year-old priest popping into my home at midnight for a chat; me sitting at the top of the stairs, him on his customary third from the bottom. And what a good listener he was.’ I gazed at what the man had indicated, and I saw that from the shadows a shape had begun to resolve itself into something that made my heart beat faster. I found myself grow breathless with anticipation. ‘Now I can reinterpret what I saw. I believe that there are intelligent beings who ride through the universe like radiation. Normally, you don’t see them, can’t detect them, but they’re flowing through worlds and everything on them as if that solid matter isn’t there. Then one took notice of me and stopped.’
‘And baited a trap, Mason. You let them in. You’ve killed us all.’
‘How can you know that?’ I shrugged. ‘What I saw on the stair wasn’t the whole organism. It was a tiny part of it. Maybe only a single atom of its body. But in our universe it manifested itself as something the size of a man. Call me naïve, but at this moment I believe we’ve been invited into the very being of my old visitor.’
‘Your visitor is Death.’
I looked into the darkness where a figure came into view. ‘Would Death show us that?’
Vertical planes of a hard paleness contained a fog of shadow. Into it stepped a shape. Of course I recognized it. Up there at the top of the stairs an eight-year-old Mason Konrad saw the figure for the very first time. The boy that was me stared down, apparently into my eyes. On his face, an expression of awe replaced the one of fear.
‘Why are you here?’ the boy whispered. ‘What do you want?’ The eyes widened. ‘Hey. I saw you today. You were in the glass case at the museum.’ The child that was me smiled in delight. ‘I remember what they called you. You’re Natsaf-Ty … you’re keeper of the sacred crocodiles. Whatever they are.’ He laughed as he sat down on the step. The brown eyes twinkled as the smile on his face dispelled the sense of gloom that had surrounded him after a day at school when the bullies had pushed him around. A day when he’d heard his mother cry herself to sleep over money worries in her bedroom.
What I saw at the moment, as I looked out through the strangely – surreally – closed eyelids of Natsaf-Ty was a boy already on his first steps to maturity.
‘You’ll never guess what happened to me today?’ He made himself comfortable on the top step. ‘These kids shoved me around, called me names, I was so frightened I wanted to kill myself. But tonight I’m talking to you. Imagine talking to you, an Egyptian mummy that’s been lying in the desert for thousands of years? But if I’m not scared of you, why on earth should I be scared of some stupid kids who call me names? That wouldn’t make sense, would it? If I’m not frightened of ghosts then a couple of idiots at school shouldn’t bother me.’ The boy clapped his hands together as he realized a fact. ‘But do you want to know something?’ He leaned forward with a friendly smile. ‘You’re not frightening, are you? And you know something else? You’ve got a … a … what do they call it … a good … no, you’ve got a wise face. That’s it: wise! You’re here to help me, aren’t you?’
I looked up at the boy whose face shone with renewed hope.
A shiver rippled through me; cold points scaled my backbone. ‘That’s the moment when I realized I’d won the first battle.’
The man beside me shook his head. ‘No. That was the moment that I and my kind lost the war.’ He closed his eyes; tremors shuddered through his chest.
If scientists and priests do agree on one thing, it is that there is a unity in all things, or a singularity in the universe. This had to be the example presented to me now. In a single moment of time I looked up the stairs to where an eight-year-old Mason Konrad happily talked to his visitor. Already he sensed his life would soon change for the better. In that same moment I saw a plain that I wouldn’t describe as vast, or tiny, for the simple fact was it didn’t possess dimensions I could understand. It’s sufficient for me to say I saw an ‘openness’ on which stood red figures. Just as the ‘openness’ had neither beginning nor end, the red figures extended down and up into infinity (if those words can be accurate in this context). A little while ago, I would have imagined they all looked like Natsaf-Ty, keeper of the sacred crocodiles.
Now I know better.
Don’t I?
I blinked. The sun pressed against my neck; a body of heat that made my skin tingle. Insects buzzed among wildflowers at the side of the road. In front of me a much reduced group of Echomen formed a ragged cluster on the road. Most were sinking to their knees, some were already dead. Extreme switches between heat and cold had damaged their bodies so much that their deaths were not only inevitable but just moments away. It didn’t seem long ago that the Echomen had become a formidable force that were destined to sweep Homo sapiens away and replace them with a race of copied Mason Konrads.
Now they are fragile things, defeated by a power that had brushed them away as you or I might bat away a mayfly. When I was fifteen I witnessed a neighbour’s dog kill a rat that had crept from its nest under a shed. At the time I’d been thrilled to see how the dog pounced. With a shake of the head the terrier had snapped the rodent’s neck. I’d cheered the dog as a heroic defender of the neighbourhood against the verminous attacker. Only later did I pity the rat. It had only been doing what its nature directed it to do. I remember it had dark inquisitive eyes; its brown pelt was sleek, nothing that could be described as repulsive. The animal had probably been foraging for its babies; when the parent didn’t return they’d have died of hunger. Damn it, the rat didn’t seem so much a villain at the end of the day.
Now the Echomen died. They’d only obeyed their nature. Maybe they couldn’t even been described as evil.
Most of the Echomen lay on the ground now, breathing their last. The one with the cratered face managed to remain on his feet. The wound released a pulsing stream of blood down over his jaw. The hole dilated to the extent
it took his left eye, causing it to deflate into a wrinkled pouch. Around his right eye the skin had turned black. Meanwhile, his breathing had deteriorated so much his chest rose and fell as he tried to claw oxygen from the air.
‘Don’t look so pleased with yourself, Mason,’ he gasped. ‘You believe you saved the world from us. But are you sure you haven’t built a bridge between this planet and the Thing that enjoys your company?’
‘I haven’t. What we saw is beyond good and evil. But it helped us get rid of you once and for all.’
‘But at what price, Mason … what price?’ The colour left his face. ‘What does it want in return?’
Blood gushed from the man’s mouth. With a sigh he collapsed to the ground to lay there dead with the rest of his kind.
Have you ever answered questions in such a way that your statements are the complete opposite to what you know is the truth? You say ‘yes’, you mean ‘no’. But you’re not being mean, or dishonest, you are endeavouring to protect the person asking the questions.
Example. A child asks, ‘But Mummy, does Santa Claus really exist?’ Parent replies, ‘Of course he does, dear.’
The boy waiting for the bus that will take him back to camp takes hold of the girl’s hand. ‘You do still love me, don’t you?’ When she hugs him she secretly glances at her wristwatch, not wanting to be late for her new flame. ‘Of course I still love you.’
Patient to doctor, ‘The operation was a success, then? You got it all?’ ‘Don’t worry, Mr Johansson, you’ll be back playing golf in no time at all.’
Widow to priest, ‘There really is a Heaven, isn’t there, Father?’ ‘Oh, assuredly so, Mrs Johansson. Your husband is in Paradise.’
I don’t want to hammer the point too remorselessly but you get my drift? Sometimes a white lie hurts less than the truth.
So when I returned to the knot of people standing on the road – Eve, Madeline, Ulric, Kirk and the commandos – the first three questions asked of me I answered truthfully.