Beneath the Rising

by Premee Mohamed

  She’d gotten a lot of zoning concessions to build this house so that it looked like its neighbours outside; it wasn’t till you got deep that you’d know it was hers. Or a supervillain’s, maybe. But a stalker would know. Might be out there now, dressed in black. Wouldn’t even need to have followed us, if he’d done his homework and figured out her address.

  “What’s going on?” I whispered.

  “I saw... I mean, I thought I saw...” She shook her head, and moved away from the decorative glass pane of the door, as if someone were peering through it right now, inches away. “Don’t leave. I need to go make some phone calls.”

  “What? It’s the middle of the night! I have to get home, I have work tomorrow!”

  She disappeared into the darkness, and I took a single step to follow, then stopped. You can’t just boss me around! I wanted to yell, but frankly, there would have been no point.

  Something dark fluttered again on the lawn, the cat or leaf or shadow, the perfectly ordinary thing, I told myself as I fled from the door, no longer laughing. There was something out there. Something that had frightened her. How safe were we in the house?

  I took a deep breath and headed to the stair tree. The Red Line would lead down to some places I knew—theatre, games room, a couple of small chemistry and biology labs, a tissue culture room, and Ben’s tank. It was Ben I wanted to hang out with now, and I don’t know what kind of world it is where a Pacific giant octopus becomes a symbol of safety, but there you are.

  He had been an accident—a test survivor of a batch of drugs meant not to slow aging but to improve heart function, back in the day. Johnny had patented the heart drug just a couple of years ago, and kept Benjamin Franklin, Science Octopus (his full name) a secret. Even the contractors who had knocked out walls and built the reinforced tank hadn’t known what was going in it, I recalled. She’d told them the triple-thick plexiglass and airtight seams were for physics experiments with dark matter. Conniving little weirdo.

  “Where smarts won’t do, cunning often will,” she’d say. “People think I’m an owl. I’m a fox.”

  “You’re a mutant,” I’d tell her. “Like the X-Men.”

  “Clearly you have no idea how hard it is to be a girl, and my age, and a scientist, in a world where the old boys’ club still holds sway,” she’d said. We had been hanging out in her room, the usual mess, floor crunchy with pieces of molecular models. “Everything I do has to be checked a hundred times; Doctor Joe in Kokomo gets published after one half-assed attempt. They can call in favours I have no access to. And they call me a freak so often I keep thinking I need to get it printed on my lab coats. They have peers. I have fans. One sent me this huge scrapbook he’d made of all my tabloid appearances. It was as big as a phonebook. Genius child really a thousand year-old alien. Johnny Chambers: nanotech monster! Prodigy says ‘I’m taking over the world!’”

  “Aren’t you?”

  “Maybe later.”

  “Well I don’t feel sorry for you,” I said. “You don’t know how hard it is to be brown. Like, you can’t know that, no matter what else you do. I’d take being white and rich and pretty and people thinking I’m an idiot any day.”

  “And a fake,” she’d said, turning it back to herself again, as she always did. Insulting even though I hadn’t wanted her pity. But that was how she thought about everyone in her life: whether they met her standards, not whether their standards might be different from hers. You got used to it after a while.

  Ben’s room brimmed with warm green light, the tank bulbs shining through the giant kelp. Her dad’s hand-me-down reading chair leaned against it, overstuffed blue leather bulging at all the seams, brass nailhead trim hanging on for dear life. I stepped over the piles of books on the floor and curled up in the cool leather, pressing my palm to the wall of the tank. Ben floated out of his castle carrying three toys, a tangled mass of red-brown muscle topped with golden eyes the size of grapefruits.

  “What is up, Science Octopus,” I said, holding my hand there until he touched the glass on his side with one tentacle and then backflipped off to another part of the tank. You couldn’t quite meet his gaze; it wasn’t set up that way, not to be eye-to-eye with the human eye. You felt like you were looking at a toy or a robot instead of an animal. Something about their shape. Even the kids’ stuffed animals were easier to make eye contact with.

  And yet, simply having another living thing here made me feel better. Less scared. In my house you never knew how used you got to other people being within three feet of you at all times till they suddenly weren’t. Johnny swung the other way—she could barely stand a crowd for more than a couple of hours before getting snappy and twitchy, and she hated to be touched. I remembered the summer she’d picked up krav maga, some old guy—a professor, I think—put his hand on her bare shoulder at an awards banquet and got thrown across the room before either of them realized what was happening. After that she wore a sweater over all her evening gowns.

  I asked her once about why she flies commercial, since she could obviously afford her own planes and pilots, but there she is, right there in that shared metal tube with the common man. “I gotta keep exposing myself to people,” she said apologetically. “Otherwise I forget what they’re like. You spend too long in the lab, or in the numbers, or at the observatory, or in the field, and then you look up and it’s like—oh no! Look at all these people. Brrrr! Like a shock to the system. I gotta keep my immunity up.”

  “Is that why you keep me? So you can keep your immunity up to normal people instead of scientists?”

  “I keep you,” she had said, “because you are mine.”

  “And you don’t like people touching your stuff.”

  “No I do not.”

  Couldn’t deny it. She’d moved out of her mom’s house at eight, with her blessing, when the publicity was at its height.

  (“Oh, so what. Eve Plumb bought a house when she was eleven!”

  “Who’s that?”)

  Somewhere that no one might touch her stuff except her. The pique of a child, you’d think, but she’s never really been a child with anyone except me. And it hadn’t been a snit. It had been as calculated and rational as anything else she’d built—the telescopes, the dark matter labs, the experimental greenhouses with their frankencanola and monstertatoes and byzantine ventilation systems to prevent a molecule of pollen from going the wrong way, her institutions and plants and warehouses and farms and factories. Like the tank for this strange squishy thing, floating past me occasionally and showing off his toys.

  “That’s real nice, Ben,” I said.

  The other thing in the room whose gaze I couldn’t meet seemed to be watching me anyway: her chemistry robot, which I’d always been leery of. I hated its two huge depthless lenses, like the eyes of a shark. (“It’s not looking at you,” she had said again and again, “it’s just that it needs two lenses for depth perception, and you’ve got pareidolia.”

  “I think there’s a cream for that now.”)

  But I knew it wanted to do science on me. It had once, for example, electroplated a dung beetle that had wandered in there by accident (admittedly, it had survived; you saw it walking around the house every now and then, although in a very shaky gait). The solid tapestry of puffy and scented rainbow, unicorn, and cloud stickers all over it made absolutely no difference to my feelings towards it, nor did the fact that it was one of her prized possessions—she had created a huge database of potential drugs, and used the robot to synthesize them automatically before doing some kind of ultrafast modelling on another computer, then cells on a chip, then something called ‘organoids.’ It cut years off her drug development process and had probably saved a lot of lives, but it also looked a lot like a praying mantis with several stabbing limbs, and I had seen enough movies to know how it would move when it finally attacked me.

  I realized I was falling asleep, or my body was simply taking matters into its own hands, as the chair warmed under my body. No big deal if I
spent the night, I supposed, providing I called home in the morning, but how would I ever wake up in time for work? Might have to risk it. Tired. Johnny would wake me up, when she came back. Whenever that happened. Should be soon...

  I floated down into black and green light.

  a dream of darkness, a dream of light that was not light, streaming past me

  a stench, rotted meat and ashes, a stink of solvent, swamp gas, a bloated deer at the side of the road, old blood, cancerous chemicals

  a dream of stones

  a dream of stones over me, blue and white, thrumming to shake me apart

  to cry out and cover the ears only, to pretend courage

  to scream, to go unheard

  light not meant for real eyes

  a warm pressure, a multitude, a moist stink of licking shadow

  the stones!

  the watchers!

  I woke up screaming, woke myself up, not a real scream but a hypersonic bat-high whine like an infant at the edge of its pain threshold, hands over my ears to block even that out.

  The world had ended, there was nothing we could do, not even witness it, the noise and the shaking drove us down like animals to cower, eyes shut and ears hidden to block it out, unable to, the entire body ending like the world ending, tearing apart in precisely the same way. A dream of blackness in which everything was both visible and wrong.

  My throat hurt; I tasted blood. Ben floated over, tentacle-tipping the glass tentatively near the chair, like he wanted to pat me on the shoulder. I put a hand to the tank and waited while he touched it on his side. Trained him to do that. Like a dog waiting for “all right” before it could eat. She wanted to see if he would remember.

  She. She who? I felt fuzzy, as if I’d hit my head. My watch said I’d been asleep for two hours. She should have come back. Had something happened? No, ridiculous. We were safe. House a fortress.

  All the same, I felt intensely as if I were being watched. Not by the robot or the octopus, who had both looked away. But something else, in the empty room.

  I crawled out of the chair, wincing as my gravel-scraped palms stuck to the leather. It felt like leaving sanctuary. Like in movies where the hero steps off the churchyard dirt, hallowed ground, and the vampire or werewolf gets him. I swallowed hard—more blood, Christ—and forced myself onwards. At the staircase, a faint glow from above reflected down the handrail, promising safety, or at least company.

  It was coming from the main kitchen. All the blinds were down, barriers of tasteful dove-grey that matched the walls, reflecting back the silvery light of the halogens.

  (not like the light at the end of the)

  (be quiet)

  (it was a dream)

  Johnny was at the island, staring at the coffeemaker, a big Italian thing enameled in cherry-red like a Ferrari. It looked like a transforming robot from one of those Japanese shows the kids watched. Johnny never did things in half-measures. It was just starting to hiss, but she heard the sound of my socked feet on the floor anyway.

  “Hi,” she said without turning. “You okay?”

  “Glk,” I said. The pain in my throat prevented anything else. I got a glass of water from the fridge and stood beside her. She smelled of raw coffee and her mom’s line of expensive soaps, herbal and sweet, the smell of money; but her Spongebob Squarepants pajamas smelled of the same fabric softener we used.

  “Fell asleep in Ben’s room,” I said. “What’s going on?”

  “Don’t leave tonight,” she said, voice so low I could barely hear her.

  “...Uh...” My brain gummed up, stalled out. That’s the problem with naps really, you never feel a hundred percent afterwards, even if you really needed it. She wanted me to stay? No. She just didn’t want me to leave. She didn’t particularly want us to be together, she just didn’t want me outside.

  Sweat broke out on my neck, and something else, a buzz, as if it had been asleep and was just coming awake. I rubbed at my nape, fingers tangling in sweaty hair.

  “That’s why,” she said, as if I had finished my thought. “Feel that?”

  “What?”

  “Yeah. It’s watching the house.”

  “Who is? ‘It’ who? That thing?”

  “You shouldn’t have walked me home,” she said. The coffee machine finished and left a gaping silence punctuated with little clicks and beeps as it wound down. The glass cup of espresso was small enough to look proportional in her shaking hand.

  “Hooooly shit, that is not an answer,” I said, feeling hysteria rising, trying to push it back down. I’d never heard her talk like this before. “You let me, anyway. You should have stopped me if...Is it the thing? And how do you know all this? And what were you doing? Jesus, I woke up freaking out, I had the worst fucking dreams—”

  “What?”

  “I said how do you know this and who’s watching the house. You can answer in either ord—”

  “You fell asleep,” she said. “And you had... you had a nightmare?”

  “Answer the question! Jesus Christ!”

  She turned at last, fixing me with the full wattage of her green stare. I tolerated it for as long as I could, then winced and turned away. “Well, I guess you’re involved whether I like it or not.”

  “Involved in what?”

  “There’s a long answer and a short answer,” she said flatly, “and both of them are going to require the willing suspension of disbelief.”

  “I watch a lot of kids’ movies. Do your worst.”

  “The short answer is the thing is yes, currently, probably, watching the house and deciding what to do next; and I know about it because I’ve always known it knew about me.”

  “That’s the short answer?”

  She shrugged, and sipped her espresso.

  I felt as if the room was revolving slowly around me, and eased myself onto a stool, hanging onto the island. Fainting twice in two days couldn’t be good for you; and here, I’d hit a slate floor instead of vinyl tiles.

  “If I go,” I said, “it would follow me... back to my house.”

  “I think so.”

  “And that would be bad.”

  “Definitely.”

  “But it hasn’t... it hasn’t done anything.”

  “Not yet.”

  “The dream I had...was just a dream. Right? It doesn’t mean anything. It just...”

  “It might mean nothing. Proximity effects. It might mean that it... it’s watching you, too, and not just me. I just don’t understand how...” She trailed off.

  I drank more water, diluting the blood still in my throat. I could barely remember the dream now—something about colours—but the screaming had been real enough. The kids. Mom. If just watching me had led to that, I couldn’t let it get anywhere near them.

  “Don’t you have another way out of this place? It’s practically a fortress. And fortresses have secret exits for when things go sideways. Like castles do, like medieval castles. Tunnels. Buried lakes with ferries. Secret monorails. Panic rooms...”

  “I do have a panic room.”

  “What about the secret monorail?”

  “Never thought I’d need one. And didn’t we have the conversation about being a supergenius versus a supervillain years ago?”

  “I think we need to have it again. What about a secret getaway zeppelin hidden in the roof?”

  “Blimp, Nicky. A zeppelin has rigid sides, I’d never fit one up there. Anyway, no.”

  “I cannot believe that you have all this money and you don’t have a secret getaway blimp for when monsters are watching the house,” I said. “What’s the point?”

  “I know, I know. But even if we got out, there might be nowhere we can go now.” She put her empty cup down and pressed the button on the machine again. “You don’t believe me, do you.”

  “I...”

  “But do you believe that I believe it?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Absolutely I do. Because I saw your face at the Creek today, if no other reason. You�
��re the thing I believe.”

  She dropped her head into her hands for a second. “Listen,” she said, breathing fast through her mouth as if she’d been running. “I think... I’m gonna have to get you up to speed on this before things start to happen.”

  “Things? What things? Things like what?”

  “Think of a house, right? A house is a house. But also, our world is a house.”

  “All ri—”

  “Lots of doors. Any locked door, if you’ve got a key you can get in, or if it’s a keypad, you have to know the code, or ask somebody for the code.”

  “Got it.”

  “Then once you’re inside, what have you got? More doors. Doors to bathrooms, closets, bedrooms. You can move easily between them too.”

  “John, why are you panting like that?”

  “Listen, this thing, this watcher? Part of a cabal of things that have been invading Earth and other places for a long time. The first one was about seventy million years ago. Nothing had evolved that had keys or codes to keep invaders out. Whatever you want to call Them—I guess ‘the Ancient Ones’ is as good a shorthand as any, or the Watchful Ones, Those Who Live Outside—They’ve been locked out from Earth before, but They’re used to being able to leave and come back whenever They want. They open the doors and come in, and only evil follows, because They are nothing but evil. Only evil. All of Them. They don’t just want to occupy, They never have. That’s not enough. They want to conquer.”

  “Johnny, you’re freaking out. Put down the coffee and—”

  “No, sit down, listen to me. Shut the fridge. Listen. The first written records of Them are from Sumeria—the destruction of Ur, the flood in Shuruppak, Khorsabad, what happened in Nineveh, and not just there, hundreds of places where the records were murals or paintings, pre-literate, or no survivors to leave an account at all, do you understand me? Not one survivor. The fall of Carthage. What They did to Kahuachi, in Peru. What They did in Vilcabamba, the Harappas people exterminated in India, ancient Jericho, Çatal Hüyük in Turkey, Newgrange in Ireland, the Minoans, the Mycenaens.”