Torn Realities

by Post Mortem Press

  She hoped it was just her imagination.

  She'd never had problems controlling her imagination before.

  She cycled through the airlock, then pushed away from the ship, keeping a careful eye on her tether. She drifted slowly away, out into the void of space. Dim, distant stars glittered all around.

  Except directly in front of the ship. The nose of the ship vanished into blackness, like it had been sheered off.

  It was almost as if the ship had snagged on some imperfection in space, and the energy of the ship's forward momentum ripped a hole in the universe. And if it took the energy of the ship moving at relativistic speeds to get into this mess, she would never be able to pull herself back out.

  She was trapped like a fly in a spider web.

  She saw deep, oily ripples in the darkness, but she couldn't tell if they were real or figments of her imagination. She drifted to the place where the nose vanished. Curiosity pulled at her. She reached a hand toward the invisible black, then snatched it back.

  She went back inside and plugged herself back into cold sleep to wait for Earth's response.

  *****

  S clutched her hand. "Are you nervous?" she asked.

  R nodded. Of course she was.

  "I heard that they might force you to take a name," S teased. "Since you're going to be in so many headlines."

  R frowned. The clones were allowed to choose names if they wanted them, but R had never seen the point. A designation had always been good enough.

  "It's too bad you can't go downside. They could pin a medal on you and everything!" S said.

  R had lost all interest in visiting the planet when their instructors told the clones that their skeletal structure would collapse under Earth's gravity. S still thought the idea of visiting their species' birthplace was terribly romantic, though.

  "I'm going to miss you," R whispered. "I can't imagine what life will be like without you filling my silences."

  S kissed her cheek. "Maybe I can be a stowaway."

  R laughed. "Yeah, great idea. You've always been so good at staying quiet and out of sight."

  She almost wished that S had suggested that she pass on the mission. That she let someone else have the incredible honor that they'd dropped onto her shoulders.

  S squeezed R's hand. "I'm going to miss you."

  *****

  R woke up in the dark. A figure hulked over her, laid a cold hand on her cheek. "Come inside," it whispered. Its voice sounded like her own. Like S's voice. "We're waiting for you."

  Chills crawled down R's spine. Was this a dream? She never dreamed. "What are you?"

  "There's only one way to find out."

  She blinked and the dark form before her was gone.

  But the chill that had crawled down her spine retreated to her head and she knew she was no longer alone on this mission.

  *****

  "Is it true that you'll never come back?" the reporter asked.

  R rubbed her eyes. She was tired. The ceremony had taken hours, and there were so many interviews. The reporters all floated awkwardly, clutching the wall with white-knuckled hands and jerking back and forth with overcompensating, gravity-accustomed muscles. Their long legs trailed uselessly, ending in tiny, club-like feet. They looked so wrong to her. She wondered how she looked to them.

  They all asked the same questions. "It's true," R said. "My mission is one-way."

  "I hear the next generation, the 239s, can actually see radiation. Why aren't they sending one of them instead?"

  "I'm sure they'll send at least one, when they're ready. I'm only going in one direction. That leaves a lot of space still unexplored."

  "Aren't you afraid?"

  R shrugged. "We were created for space exploration. It's an honor to be chosen to go to deep space."

  "That's not really an answer."

  R met the reporter's eyes. "Of course I'm afraid."

  *****

  R fired a probe into the darkness. It vanished, and her readings went dark. She connected the next probe to a cable before she fired it. The instruments still went dark. The cable played out. She hit the switch to reel it back in.

  The ship shuddered, and lurched forward. Fear spiked through her, and she hit the emergency disconnect button. The cable snaked into the blackness.

  She wondered why it didn't pull her in, too.

  R stared down at the controls. She couldn't run away. Maybe she could push through.

  Her fingers lingered on the accelerator. Another hand slid over hers. Lips brushed her ear.

  S's lips, but cold. Like space. "Yes. Come to us." Greedy fingers trailed through her mind, clutching at thoughts, memories. Hours and hours of training. S, laughing at one of R's rare jokes. A shining blue and white orb, floating against the black.

  A wave of covetous hunger pulsed through her. The thing in her mind wanted Earth.

  She pushed herself away from the controls, too hard, and bounced against the far wall. Was she going crazy? Was this really happening? She buckled herself into her cold sleep pod with shaking hands.

  *****

  "Courage isn't about not feeling fear," R told the reporter. "It's about not letting it stop you. We're ready to explore the galaxy. Nothing is going to stop us. We're ready to face what waits out there."

  *****

  By the time her orders arrived, she felt shaky and sick. Normal sleep eluded her, and cold sleep offered no escape. The monster with S's face lurked in the corners of her vision, touched her cheek when she closed her eyes, whispered in her dreams. Sometimes, she forgot that it wasn't S.

  She hoped that Earth would give her a solution.

  She'd already tried all of their ideas. Except the last one. If all else fails, try pushing through the barrier.

  If she went through the barrier, the thing on the other side would take all of her memories. All of her knowledge and training. And her ship. She imagined it arriving back home, wearing her face, smiling her smile with its cold teeth.

  She imagined it taking S's hand, then her soul. She imagined her shining planet vanishing into blackness.

  *****

  The reporter leaned forward, awkward and clumsy in the zero G. "Are you really sure that's a good idea? We have no idea what's out there. What could be waiting."

  R laughed. "That's why we have to go."

  *****

  Her orders were to push through.

  It wanted her to come through. It urged her forward with her lover's face and cold, strange hands.

  R was tired of being alone.

  She didn't want to go deeper into the spider's web, but it grew harder to resist its call every day.

  The monster smiled at her, smug, patient. "Your strength is fading. Soon, you will come to us. You will love us. You have no other choice."

  S would have known not to say that.

  R wrote her lover a long letter. She didn't mention the specter. Just love and good times and laughter shared.

  But she put every detail in her report. She didn't try to justify her decision to anyone. Fear was part of her motivation--fear for herself, fear for Earth--but a big part of it was anger, too.

  She still had other choices.

  She crossed power lines that her instructors had warned her never to cross, rigged a timer on the fuel supply. Started a countdown to acceleration.

  Then she stripped down and pushed herself out the airlock, away from the ship, away from the tear. S floated in her vision, reaching for her. "What are you doing?"

  "You can't have me." Pain coursed through her, but she'd been bred for space. She'd prepared for this death, and it was better than living as a monster's puppet.

  The universe numbed her bare skin, froze her fingers. Her ship slipped forward, disappearing into the oily black. Only meters of it remained when white light flashed. The darkness shattered.

  The stars came back, and R flew away.

  ANKOR SABAT

  C. Deskin Rink

  C. Deskin Rink has
appeared in Pseudopod and my go-to magazine Title Goes Here (we were both in Issue #6). I knew I wanted this story by the end of page one of the manuscript, not because of its fantasy/post-apocalyptic vibe I got, or how the "harem" at the end reminded me of tableaus from hell (just wait), but because of the confidence in Rink's voice. It's ballsy to pull off a fantasy/horror blend like this--the possibility of crashing is massive. But Rink pulls it off. Handily.

  Seething eternally beyond the ken of sane and wholesome worlds lies the land of Ankor Sabat; to look upon its desolate ruin is to doubt the normal configuration of earth and sky and to believe, instead, that the landscape has undergone an inversion and that a plummet into the nightmare infinites of an ultimate cosmic abyss is imminent. Singular and terrible is the sole disfigurement of otherwise unchanging tundra: a mountain composed entirely of dark obsidian; a mountain possessed of fearsome spires, terraced escarpments and grotesque crags which beetle and sheer to unthinkable heights. Crowning its impossible zenith is the Black Ziggurat of Xethogga whose six-angled apex pierces hideously the uppermost reaches of a firmament which knows no hour except eternal midnight. Such is the dwelling place of Siosotep, the High Priest: a place unvisited by all save for unspeakable abominations and such men as are in the grip of irrevocable madness.

  But with a clear mind and purpose did Lord Galen of House Cornelius tread the powdery ash of Ankor Sabat; with purposeful strides did he follow the mosaic of an onyx staircase winding up the mountain to the Black Ziggurat itself. Ever and anon alongside the path, like titan headstones, there reared basalt megaliths topped by piled masses of dripping candles made from the tallow of unwilling sacrificial victims. Created by the candles’ unsteady luminance there danced a black kaleidoscope of shadows, some of which seemed to vacillate between concave and convex with total disregard for chiaroscuro; others appeared to walk or leap at intervals which implied a sort of hateful intelligence. Through the funeral rows, a cold wind alternately moaned like a dirge or howled like mocking laughter. Though Lord Galen carried a repeater rifle of fine manufacture, he kept it unloaded and slung on his back, for the surroundings affrighted him not; though his joints ached with age and atony, he made haste: the search he had set out upon so long ago was nearly at an end.

  Many years ago when he was but a youth, Lord Galen met the incomparable Lady Fiona. She was a beauty distilled from the celestial spheres themselves: possessed of tumbling raven locks, cool viridian eyes, angelic curves and opalescent skin that seemed to possess its own ethereal luminosity. Her laugh was water trickling down little silver bells and her voice was the warmth of spring’s beatific embrace.

  She understood him as no one else did; oft times they stayed up late together engaged in long debates or the telling of stories. Although she was largely unskilled in the culinary arts, she frequently insisted on baking him pastries or other treats and he, in turn, greeted her fumbling attempts with alacrity. To cheer him during his frequent gloomy fugues, she learned to sing and play the harp and-–though she never exhibited much skill--he loved her all the more for the effort.

  They were wed beneath the flower-draped arches of the many-pillared Grand Temple of Hequet whose walls were scintillating jasper and whose belfries housed ringing crystal globes. Together they presided over House Cornelius’s domains with a firm but gentle hand. The peasantry prospered, the coffers overflowed and the rival Thousand-and-One Houses grew to respect and admire them.

  But less than a year later, when Lord Galen returned home from a hunting trip, he discovered four of his guards torn limb-from-limb, his bedroom window broken in from the outside, monstrous claw marks on the second floor balcony and, of his beloved, no trace. Most disturbing of all was what he beheld graven into the wall above her bed: a monstrous, blue sigil in the form of a six-lobed eye. No earthly implement could have rendered the perfectly aligned delineations of that unmentionable shape; nor could any earthly ink have provided its hateful color which glimmered balefully even in total darkness.

  Terrible was Lord Galen’s grief, but even more terrible was the thing which grew by degrees within him: his wrath. For many, many years thereafter Lord Galen scoured the Earth for his beloved. He traveled the perfumed fields of his native Great Malastar where carnivorous flowers lure the unwary with succulent fruit; he sailed the churning waves of the Sea of Sorrows where leviathans best left undescribed are fabled to heave; he braved the green depths of Catrazzarr where the Great Road to the netherworld is rumored to lay; he spoke to Sheshan-Ra, whom men call the sorcerer; he questioned the vulpine Ardan SolarStorm, the greatest warrior-mystic of the Dark Horizon Tribe; he conversed with the arcane scholars of the prestigious Benediction University-–but nowhere did he hear tell or catch a glimpse of a single glyph or rune which resembled the monstrous, six-lobed eye.

  Frustrated and enraged by his futile wanderings, and with the treasury of his House sorely depleted, he unleashed a pogrom against his own peasantry in a desperate attempt to root out any who might be sorcerers capable of conjuring the blue sigil of the six-lobed eye. In one particularly brutal incident, Lord Galen had a score of mystics, soothsayers, midwives and herbalists burned alive when none would confess. Such actions could not go unnoticed, and the next day the newspapers were agog over the massacre. The council of the Thousand-and-One Houses was quickly convened to declare Lord Galen no longer fit to rule. Thereafter a coalition of soldiers attacked his manorial complex and Lord Galen managed to escape only with his life and his six-chambered repeater-rifle.

  Across barren moors, scalding calderas, sacerdotal forests and parched grasslands did he flee until he reached the many-templed city of Saturnine which rises above the sapphire waters of tessellated lagoons. The flower of his youth long since withered, Lord Galen spent the next three lustrums skulking through lichen-bearded back alleys like a common gutter-rodent. He preyed upon the weak when he had to, but for the most part took to hunting down the manifold priests and hierophants residing within Saturnine’s damp walls. Many of the clergy of Aten, Ma’at, Osiris, Bast and Hequet perished slowly beneath Lord Galen’s bony claws. Yet, none knew or confessed aught of the unspeakable blue sigil. Finally a priest of Anubis, after he had lost too many body parts to bear, blubbered and sobbed of how the sigil of the six-lobed eye was no symbol belonging to a wholesome and sane pantheon, but a blasphemous rune used to invoke the favor of the foul other-god, Xethogga.

  Before being mercifully gifted with death, this priest told of Xethogga the Unspeakable; Xethogga the hermaphroditic, idiot deity who came to the Earth in antediluvian cycles from the cold worlds beyond the expanse of rational space and time. Xethogga, who listened eternally to the low booms of hateful bells and who dwelt always amidst the unlitten and nameless chambers of the nightmare castle of the thirteen abyssal pylons. Xethogga who held jealously the black secret of Nothoth-Yamon in its shapeless appendages and, in its mindlessness, scorned it. Before expiring, the priest confessed that Xethogga’s grotesque worshippers were wont to abduct the fairest of maidens for use in their unutterable rites. These unfortunate girls were hauled thither the wretched, ashen leagues of the land of Ankor Sabat, to a mountain of razor obsidian, to the Black Ziggurat wherein broods the bloated High Priest Siosotep.

  Nigh seven years were required for Lord Galen to finally locate the blasted lands of Ankor Sabat, for the priest had known little of their whereabouts save that they lay somewhere beyond the fortieth arctic parallel. But, eventually, Lord Galen came to a horrid village of low stone hovels filled with inbred tenants who greeted him in detestably apish fashion. Terrible were the filthy children who pawed incessantly at his snowy beard, but worse still were the women who lasciviously caressed his wrinkled face whist emitting amorous hoots. The stooped archon of that benighted place grunted fantastic tales of a mighty obsidian mountain that lay over the horizon, and Lord Galen knew that at last, his journey was nearing its end. Very soon he would recover his beloved into his arms.

  As he crossed the never-ending tundra of ash, time
quite ceased to exist. In the sky above, the sun, moon, stars and spheres appeared not at all. Neither day nor night came and, for a time, a diffuse twilight reigned always. But eventually even that faint, grey phosphorescence waned till it gave way utterly to an all-consuming darkness. Ash clogged his throat and he quickly drained what little water he had managed to bring with him. Yet through it all, he kept his head upright and scanned always the distant shadows for the obsidian mountain which was throne to the Black Ziggurat of Xethogga. When at last he reached it, he felt in his heart a glimmer of a sensation he had not felt since his long-departed youth-–something he could almost recall as hope.

  Swiftly did he pass the horrors which crowded obscenely the base of that obsidian mountain till he stood, at long last, before the league-high bronze gates of the Black Ziggurat. Almost greater than the mountain itself did that cruel edifice seem to tower, each frightful tier made up of thousands of cyclopean blocks individually of greater dimension than Lord Galen’s entire manor. With a groan that became quickly muffled by the ash-choked air, the mighty gates parted. Relative to themselves, they had opened only the barest crack, but it was more than sufficient to allow six men walking abreast to enter.

  Though no light issued from within, Lord Galen strode forward resolutely and without fear. He did not so much as tremble in the slightest when the colossal doors clanged shut behind him. For an interval which stretched to a veritable eternity, he traversed a hallway pillared by gargantuan ebon towers whose abacuses and capitals were so high and distant that they vanished into illimitable blackness. From behind those columns Lord Galen could detect the faint patter of uncouth feet.

  With each step, a stench like old sweat and fresh fecal matter waxed increasingly noxious until it exploded to a climax when, at last, the limitless corridor came to an end. The passage swelled abruptly into a monstrous chamber possessing six corners and tiled by immense, hexagonal flagstones. In the center there dominated an ebon throne which stretched nearly to the unseen arches overhead and upon the base of which was graven the blue sigil of the monstrous, six-lobed eye.