Resonance

by Celine Kiernan

  She pressed back against Joe, anticipating the return of the Angel’s howling greed. But – despite the nourishment he received from them – the Angel seemed to feel only the merest flicker, only the faintest suggestion of Tina’s and Wolcroft’s pain. Without an audience to marvel at them, their feelings were negligible, it seemed, and the Angel turned away again, focusing all his concentration on the lake.

  Joe gazed over Tina’s shoulder, fascinated at what he saw through her eyes. ‘It’s feeding off them.’

  ‘It’s not enough,’ she said.

  These people took far more than they gave. Even now, the woman was growing numb and still as she absorbed her share of the meagre sustenance the Angel had taken from her friend’s anguish.

  She mumbled, ‘The seer claims part of the Angel resides in the lake, Cornelius. She claims it allows her to see Vicente as he journeys under the water. Do you think this is true?’

  Wolcroft opened his eyes and looked straight up into the clouds. ‘I do not know, my dear. I have sensed nothing of him since he submerged. He is a blank to me.’

  The woman sighed. ‘Isn’t that Vicente, through and through? Always keeping the kernel of himself withheld.’ She smiled and whispered into Wolcroft’s ear. ‘And don’t we love him all the more for it, meu caro? Doesn’t it only serve to deepen our yearning?’

  He sat forward, away from her touch. Tina thought he looked marooned, all alone in the world.

  ‘Seer,’ he said dully, ‘tell me what they are doing down there.’

  She closed her eyes, welcoming the chance to concentrate on something other than his sorrow and her own, and the Angel’s disregard for it.

  ‘They’re … they’re nearing it.’

  ‘It?’

  She opened her eyes. ‘The ship – they’re being drawn to it. Time is very slow for them. It’s like they’re moving through a dream.’

  ‘A dream,’ he whispered. ‘If only.’

  Raquel pulled him back into her, closed her eyes and laid her head against his shoulder. Wolcroft’s brow creased in pain as her breathing deepened into sleep. Tina clutched Joe’s hand. Out on the ice, the children tired of playing with Luke, and retreated to the trees. Luke resumed his vigil over the tripod.

  Slowly, slowly, underwater, Harry and Vincent neared the poisonous hulk of the ship.

  Dead Angels

  THE WATER WANTED to float Vincent upwards, and he had to pull himself along the brazier chains in order to descend at all. The chain was visible for a scant few yards below him before fading to nothing in the dark. Deep below, the dull green light endlessly pulsed.

  Except for the moderate chill of the metal against his palms, Vincent did not feel in the least bit cold, and he had absolutely no notion yet of needing to breathe. Prior to the plunge, he had entertained the experiment of inhaling a lungful of water – just to see what would happen – but once submerged he had quickly discarded the notion. He did not much like the idea of this water intruding into his body. Its touch was … what was an appropriate word? Clammy? Yes. Clammy. Unpleasant.

  No wonder the pond had never featured much in the leisure pursuits of the family. Thinking back, Vincent realised it had never factored much even in their thoughts or conversations. How strange. It was as if, in all the time they had been here, the pond had existed only vaguely for them, its presence acknowledged but ignored by the human occupants of the estate.

  The deeper he went, the darker it became. Vincent waited for his eyes to adjust, as they would have underground, but they never did, and soon he was dragging himself through total darkness, with only the feel of the chains and the dull green pulse of that distant light to guide him. The old illogical panic began to swell, his fear of small spaces gnawing its familiar hole in his chest.

  You are not confined, he told himself. You are surrounded by space – it is simply space that you cannot see.

  The water began to press on him like a vice. He must be imagining that. He must. It was not nearly deep enough for such crushing pressure.

  But it is. It is. I am trapped. I am going to die!

  Vincent came to a halt, clinging childlike to the cold security of the chains, staring desperately into darkness. Chains and darkness. The dull, dead press of the water. He was trapped. He was trapped. He had been confined.

  It was all he could do not to heave a lungful of cadaverous water and scream. Then Vincent looked up, and high above him, for as far as he could see, stretched the shining vault of ice. All was space, all was light. He had been staring blindly into blackness while, overhead, such beauty glowed in silence.

  Vincent gazed upwards as the hammering of his heart subsided. Arching pathways curved into the distance – the passageway of those violent currents that had borne the magician down, then back again. Now that he had calmed himself, Vincent could hear the vast, mutinous rush of their progress through the otherwise still pond. He could feel the steady vibration the American had described as the throb of an engine. Vincent thought it felt more like the beating of a heart. Most certainly it was coming from the direction of that gangrenous light below.

  He looked down again, into pitch, into fear.

  He would do this.

  A disturbance on the chain caused him to look up. The point of entry was so distant now, it was barely a fingerprint of light. Vincent waited, unsure, then smiled as the starfish shape of a person spread briefly against it. There came the subtle tug and shiver of someone travelling along the chain.

  The American had joined him.

  It gets dark down here, boy. But I have yet to feel the need to take a breath.

  There was a hesitation in the movement on the line. Then a tapping: one, two, three.

  If you begin to feel closed in, look up and the light will comfort you.

  Again a tapping. Then the tug and shiver again, as the boy made his way down. Vincent resumed his descent. When he neared the brazier, he released the chains and launched himself down towards the light.

  He descended into grave-like stillness and a bilious pulse of green. The water here neither floated him up nor sucked him down, and when he stopped swimming he simply hung suspended in the lifeless dark, the dull throb of that engine sounding below. Uncertain, he stared down. I know what I think I am seeing, he thought. But in truth, is that what lies below me?

  If the American had not said this was a machine, if Vincent’s own mind had not already been influenced by Jules Verne, might he now be seeing something other than the curve of ornate metal and glass that bulged from the mire below? Would he be seeing a creature, perhaps, the heart of which could be heard pounding, slow and failing, within the mud of its final resting place?

  If this is a creature, I am about to swim through a gap in its very ribs. I shall, all unknowing, be drifting about its broken body; seeing wires and pistons where in fact there are organs and veins; touching metal and glass where in fact there is membrane and bone.

  Vincent shuddered and dismissed this. He was not about to come so close only to allow some squeamish fancy to turn him aside. Determined, he jackknifed down and into the jagged opening in the ship’s side, which pulsed light out into the morbid dark.

  The interior seemed entirely composed of narrow twisting tunnels, spiralled with copper ribbing. Vincent pulled himself along them, his body bending and curling, as if negotiating the curved recesses of a snail’s shell. The walls between the metal ribs were gelatinous, almost permeable, but the merest press of Vincent’s palm would cause their surface to harden. A metallic imprint would remain long after his hand was removed, fading only very slowly as the wall lost its temporary rigidity.

  The water around him was thick as jelly – warm against the skin. The light and that pulsing noise throbbed in unison. Vincent found it comforting. As comforting, perhaps, as the beat of a mother’s heart to the child within her womb. Vincent knew nothing of the womb in which he had been seeded, except that his father had kept her for more than one voyage, and that one day she had leapt to the
sharks with Vincent’s infant sister in her arms.

  Vincent frowned. It had been a long time since he had allowed himself to remember that. How strange – the memory did not bother him as usually it would. Thoughts seemed to come and go very peacefully here. Vincent felt he might be perfectly happy to go on forever like this, pulling himself along one hand after the other, the thick water parting gently ahead of him and closing gently behind, his body sliding as through warmed oil, comfortable, sleepy, content …

  His hands were pushed into the open, then his shoulders and his waist, and he was propelled outwards as if from an oesophagus. Released into warm and yielding space, he tumbled through a softness of light until he gently bumped against a floor.

  Overhead, the corpses of angels floated and spun like specimens in a jar.

  Oh, thought Vincent. Cornelius was right.

  How long did he lie there, gazing up at the mesh of wings, marvelling at the great immobile hands, the perfect, stony faces of the creatures above? How long, before realising that his own heart was slow, slow, slower than molasses, and that he was looking up at visions borrowed from the childhood he had long since shoved away? He bit down on his lip, hard enough that blood swarmed upwards and pain sent a flare into his stupid brain that screamed, You are drugged.

  Instead of wings, he saw a widespread net of tentacles; instead of angels, the hunched bodies of dead creatures, multi-jointed legs curled into lifeless bellies, heavy heads tucked onto motionless chests, all bathed in that nauseating light so they almost seemed alive with the pulse of it.

  Directly above him, part and parcel of the roof – or floor, door, wall – of this vast chamber, a huge membranous blister bulged. Inside it, something thick and segmented, ominous and diseased, coiled slow and steady and eternal, round and round and round itself like an apocalypse waiting to be born.

  Symbiote

  Boy …

  Harry paused, one hand in front of the other, his body twisted like an Indian acrobat within the spiral of a tunnel.

  Hello? he thought. Vincent?

  There was nothing but silence, and Harry waited within it, uncertain. He tried again – though it had never been proven to him that the man could read his thoughts. Vincent? Where are you?

  That deep voice, usually so self-assured, sounded again, slow and dreamy as if its owner were battling sleep. Dead … floating … go …

  Go? Was he telling Harry to go?

  Then, with desperate volume, as though the man had raised his head from his death pillow and yelled with his last breath: GET OUT!

  Harry was retreating before he even knew it. Hand over hand, backwards through the tunnels – determined to go. He would get back to the surface. He would grab Tina and Joe. They would battle their way past the dogs, past those kids, past the woman and those men, and run and run and run into the snow. It was okay to do this. Whatever was happening to Vincent, it was okay. He was a crazy, unnatural, broken man. He deserved whatever he got. He was wrong, he was wrong, he was all wrong. He was wicked.

  But Ehrich, murmured Papa. You are not wicked. And what of the Angel?

  Harry stopped crawling and pressed his forehead to the faintly glowing floor. Don’t, he told himself. Just leave. But he knew it would forever haunt him – not knowing the fate he’d left Vincent to. It would forever haunt him if he didn’t try to save the Angel. With a resigned clench of his teeth, he began, once again, to pull himself forward through the ship.

  He was expelled into the open with dreamlike abruptness: one moment pulling himself hand over hand, the next tumbling down through soft green light.

  Rolling head over heels into what felt like a yielding tangle of ropes, Harry grasped one, hoping to stop his fall. The rope had a repulsive, fleshy texture, and it gave with his weight. Too late, Harry realised it was attached to some huge floating thing that he was now dragging towards him.

  A great, blind, heavy-browed face loomed close as the curtain of ropes parted before it. Appalled, Harry kicked it away. The head twisted aside, leading its serpentine body in a slow arabesque back through what Harry now understood to be a curtain of floating tentacles. Dislodged by the movement, something uncoiled from around the creature’s neck and fell onto Harry. He found himself entangled with it, the two of them tumbling though liquid space and falling together to land with a bump against the membranous resilience of the far wall.

  Even as he was struggling free of it, Harry knew what the thing was. There was no forgetting that disgusting curled body, nor the Medusa-like trail of snakes coming from its head. This was unmistakably the pale maggot-brother of the thing Tina had taken from Vincent’s laboratory, the sight of which had caused the Angel to rage and mourn and finally fall to its knees in defeat.

  Harry kicked the thing from him and watched as it floated upwards to rejoin the tangled forest of corpses above.

  Vincent’s voice sounded in his head. Boy …

  Harry lurched to his feet. The floor curved steeply up on either side; sticky-strange and faintly luminous, it made Harry feel like a bug on the inside of a lampshade. The water here drew his hair up off his face, but it did not float him upwards as it had done the maggot creature. Instead, he had the strangest impression of being sucked gently downwards.

  Was he imagining it, or was he losing the feeling in his feet?

  Bending, he pressed his palm to the membrane of the floor. The skin of his fingers immediately went numb, and Harry snatched back his hand, trying not to panic.

  Vincent, he thought. I don’t think we should hang around here.

  Overhead, the tangle of corpses turned and drifted in response to minute currents in the globe. Harry gazed up at them. Could these be the demons of Tina’s vision? If so, it was hard to imagine what threat they posed. In fact, they looked very beautiful with the light shining through their translucent skin. The ballet of their movement was almost hypnotically peaceful. They reminded Harry of sea creatures – slow, stately, magnificent. He could watch them forever and not …

  Boy … stand up …

  Harry startled. When had he lain down? He lifted his arm and glassy threads stretched between it and the floor, releasing it slowly. He raised his head and there was a sucking feeling, as if he had been caught in a pool of jelly.

  Boy …

  Harry peeled himself free and forced himself to his feet, staggering from the boy-shaped imprint he had left in the floor’s gluey surface. Vincent’s voice was barely audible, just the one word repeated at intervals: Boy … boy … boy. Whether it was a warning or a plea, Harry could not tell. He looked around once again for the man.

  It took a shift in his understanding, but once Harry spotted Vincent, it was difficult to believe he had ever missed him. Despite the membrane that had blistered up to cover him, the man’s long dark figure was perfectly visible, spreadeagled against the wall, which, as Harry trudged around the side of the globe, became the floor. Soon he was staring through a transparent covering into the face of the man at his feet.

  The direction of Vincent’s dark gaze shifted towards a point directly above, and Harry looked up. The sight of the slow-coiling presence overhead almost caused him to scream. Then something clamped down hard on his calf and he did scream, air bubbling from his mouth and nose as he dived away. His action drew Vincent from his translucent grave, hauled forth by one strong black arm and the relentless grip he had on Harry’s leg.

  Boy, he thought, flopping limp as a newborn onto the gelatinous ground. You came for me.

  It was then Harry knew for certain that Vincent could not read his thoughts. Otherwise, he would have known that Harry had still not decided on rescuing him.

  Feeble and uncoordinated, Vincent struggled to get to his knees. Everywhere that his bare skin touched the floor, colourless strands attached themselves, and Harry could see that membranous cover already beginning its not-too-slow crawl across Vincent’s strongly muscled body. Soon the man would again be part of the floor, subsumed facedown this time, blind and helple
ss to free himself.

  Harry shuddered at the thought and, almost against his will, stooped to help.

  Vincent rose in his arms, clinging and slippery, his thoughts a jumble. Kick off, he thought. Kick off … And Harry did, cursing himself for not having thought of it earlier.

  Almost immediately a gentle weight began drawing them back to the floor, and Harry had to swim up through the viscous liquid, nearer to the tangle of dead creatures and the terrible thing that coiled and twisted in its prison on the wall above. There, he treaded water, his arms wrapped tightly around Vincent.

  As the man slowly returned to his senses, Harry searched the walls for the spot where he had come in. It must have been somewhere close to that repulsive blister and its roiling occupant. Surely there would be a door visible? Some kind of indent, even? A hole?

  Vincent’s curly head lolled, his legs bicycling feebly as he struggled to regain control. Suddenly he shuddered and shrugged loose of Harry’s grip. He sank only a little before summoning enough coordination to tread water.

  You returned for me, he thought.

  Harry grimaced and continued scanning the wall – there was an odd discolouration around the upper parts of the globe, which seemed—

  Vincent swam around to peer into his face. How do you feel? he slurred. Are you … distracted? I feel dull as ditchwater here.

  He was too close, his movements loose as a drunkard’s, and Harry pushed away from him. The gesture sent them floating backwards and Harry found himself entwined once more in that clammy net of tentacles. Vincent watched with interest as he thrashed free.

  What do you see them as, boy? Are they still angels to you?

  Were they still … Harry spun to regard the slow-moving corpses with horror. Still angels?