by Dan Glover
Standing in the entryway to the kitchen he heard a discussion between Lily and the newly arrived girl named Ena. Micah hadn’t counted on the girl being as attractive as she was... she too seemed to exude an electric field though not as intense as Kāne's.
"Your Grandfather Nate is here, my lovely Ena. Did you expect him to follow you?"
"Yes, Grandmother Lily... I knew he'd arrive as soon as he was able to modify the prototype he was working on with Pete. I didn’t expect them so soon, however. Are you sure Grandfather Nate is here?"
"I feel his presence, sweet Ena. But it wasn’t Pete who traveled here with Nate... it was Kirk."
"Will they be able to get into Cornell the same way we did, Grandmother Lily? Are they in danger?"
"The nanobots will be ready for that move, sweet Ena. If they try landing on the roof, the nanobots will swarm them as soon as they leave their flying machine. Nate will survive such an attack. Kirk will succumb, however."
Micah left without being seen. He couldn't remember the last time he stepped foot out of the University. As a young boy he must have walked into the building one day in the dim past but it seemed that he had always been here.
His parents never visited him. In fact, the only visitor he ever had was Karen, and she didn’t come here knowing she'd meet him. That was happenstance. Micah still dreamt of his mother and his father appearing at Cornell—perhaps to attend his graduation—and raving about how proud they were of his accomplishments.
His father always thought he was an idiot and his mother ignored him. She was an executive at a Wall Street firm; he worked as a welder putting together the buildings mother inhabited, and Micah was a mistake, something that occurred when unplanned sex followed a night of drinking at the office Christmas party.
Micah always wondered why his parents doted on his brother and his sister while simultaneously shunning him. Martin and Marissa were twins three years his senior. They were good students but lacked any spark of genius that raged through Micah's tormented mind.
"Your son has an IQ of over 200, Mr. and Mrs. Mann. We're recommending his transfer to an upstate school which specializes in gifted students such as Micah."
"There must be some mistake. That kid can't even wipe his own ass without using both hands."
Leave it to his father to nullify any feelings of pride that might otherwise inadvertently sully Micah's psyche. What his father didn’t understand was that the disease which would threaten his son's life was already manifesting itself by subtly destroying the boy's coordination. It wasn’t until Micah was ten years old that a doctor—on one of his many trips to the emergency room—noticed the telltale symptoms and urged his parents to have him evaluated.
When he was admitted to Cornell University at the age of twelve, Micah thought he might have finally impressed his parents enough that they would attend the open house. All the other students' parents were there. He remembered standing on the top bench in the gymnasium surveying the crowd for familiar faces and finding none. Later in his dormitory room he made a vow to never talk to his parents again. Since they never attempted to initiate contact with him it wasn’t a difficult promise to keep.
"Why does everyone hate me, Karen?"
He thought she was his friend but she too came into his life and just as quickly vanished, trailing promises behind her of keeping in touch but of course never doing so.
"Nobody hates you, Micah. They just don’t know how to relate to you."
"But we're supposed to be friends, aren’t we?"
"We are friends, Micah."
"Why do you have to leave Cornell? I don’t understand why everyone abandons me."
"I'm not abandoning you, Micah. I have my life back in England. One day soon you can visit me there. Barring that, I promise to come back here. We'll write letters to each other in the mean time. You'll see."
His first dozen letters were unanswered, as were his next dozen, and his third. Finally, he stopped writing. He always prided himself on making strict use of his allotted time and wasting it on unreturned correspondences caused a feeling of guilt to surface.
"She's probably too busy. One of these days she'll write me back. She's my friend."
He strove to see the good in people but in time it became increasingly apparent that the good he imagined was a misplaced confidence, a fairy tale he spun in his head. People were angry and mean for the most part. Even his professors liked to trick him into quagmires of illogical questions with no proper answers and then revel in his befuddlement.
Karen never did write back to him. He told himself she had lost his address though in truth she could have gotten it off any one of the dozens of letters he mailed to her.
When she appeared at Cornell a hundred years later, the experience was surreal. He didn’t want to show himself, to reveal the awful nature of what he had become. He considered lying to her but Karen saw through his deformity in a way he didn’t think possible. He still loved her despite the fact that she'd left him behind, in spite of the unrequited promises proffered.
She felt sorry for him. He could see it in her eyes... sorrow for what he'd become. Pity always enraged Micah. Mercy was a quality best served to the meek. He'd become a monster it was true, but what a monster. He held the power of a god in his hand. His creations offered immortality to the mortal and promises of better things to come.
When he began reverting to human form he felt even more ashamed to show himself. That's why he refused to go with Karen when she begged him to come away with her. They'd all laugh at him. He knew it. As long as he had his solitude, no one could laugh.
Now, he was tempted to give all that up.
He hadn’t realized the power generator was blocking radio transmissions until Lady Lily asked him to shut it down.
Walking into the underground serviced tunnel caused intense feelings of dread to wash over him... the dark was too harsh and the quiet down here unsettling in his newly human ears. He yearned for the metal, for the hardness instilled within his flesh by his tiny machines continually refashioning his body, making it indestructible. Outside the building, he was totally vulnerable.
Arriving under the maintenance shed which protected his power generator he climbed the ladder, opened the trap door at the top, and entered the tiny shack. A gentle hum indicated the generator was operating at maximum efficiency.
It was designed to operate on sea water. He'd run into a number of obstacles in its construction but by programming his nanobots to solve the problems he was able to come up with a working model in five years.
Powering down the generator involved stilling the internal fusion device. He had never shut the machine down but had developed protocols in case of that eventuality. Following the list of instructions he had mounted on the wall Micah listened as the ever-present hum faded and then ceased.
Opening the metal shutters over the lone window to allow light into the now darkened shack, he noticed movement in the sky. At first he thought it might be the nanobots assembling into another one of the myriad shapes they adopted but then he realized it was some sort of aircraft manned by human beings.
The flying machine set down without a sound. It puzzled him momentarily until he realized what he was observing... the craft was obviously constructed to transcend the vagaries of space-time. Instead of being within the grip of the gravity well caused by planet earth, this machine when energized stood outside the influence of relativity.
Both men who disembarked from the craft looked vaguely familiar. They were the thieves who traveled here with Karen all those years ago. For a moment Micah thought of leaving them to their just desserts. The nanobots would disassemble their bodies a molecule at a time until they were but scatterings on the wind.
Instead, he stepped forward to do his best to save them.
Chapter 41—Hiss
The building stank of doom.
There was nothing to eat and the water tasted of turpentine. All the windows save one were covered with a thin ye
t impenetrable metallic sheen making it impossible to look out upon the days or the nights. Time had no meaning inside these walls; not that it had much outside either.
Ena yearned to break out—to make a run for their flying machine—to fly home to the Isle of Skye and never again leave. She alternately missed Alpin and rued the fact she left him without a word of goodbye.
She laughed ruefully remembering how she had longed to leave her old home for somewhere else, anywhere that she wasn’t trapped by four walls and a feeling of lonesomeness that bordered upon insanity.
Each day the feeling of impending doom seemed to grow more pronounced until it was all she could do not to batter down the door and rush out into the open air. It was the awful sound that seemed to not only penetrate her auditory organs but seep into her skin and drill into her bones.
"We need to get out of here, Grandmother Lily. I can't stand it here."
"The time isn’t yet ripe for that, sweet Ena. Can't you see?"
"No, I cannot. I cannot see anything at all."
Her sense of prescience had abandoned her when she most needed it. Perhaps it was these hard metal walls surrounding them or the constant electromagnetic pulse emitted by Micah's generator sequestered in the lower level of the building or simply her inability to immerse her body in the ocean... whatever the reason, her days of living backwards had come to an end.
She was fain to admit her infirmity yet she doubted anyone else could fathom the depths of her despair. She had convinced herself with no good reason that they were all going to die here.
The continual and infernal hissing has insinuated itself into her very skeleton. It weaved webs of steel images in her mind trapping all thoughts gradually reducing her to a silent witness unable to articulate the dread building inside her stomach.
Father had stopped talking too. He sat cross-legged as alone in shuttered rooms he seemed to levitate off the floor as green glowing sparks crackled in the air close to his body. His countenance was that of a sage turned madman.
Grandmother Lily spoke to herself in soothing half-tones of how they would be rescued soon while Micah had disappeared all together. Without responding in words Ena realized her Grandmother was seeking to salve the longings they all felt for home and family.
She dreamt of the ocean.
They were so close to it she knew she could smell the sea breezes and even the living creatures beneath the surface if the building wasn’t sealed. She had never been away from the salt water for so long... her bones ached and her skin felt soggy, as if it was hanging off her skeleton.
Grandmother Lily, on the other hand, seemed to have had a rebirth. Her skin glowed as if she had just emerged from the depths of Lake Baikal. Her blue eyes shined like newly cut diamonds in the sunlight. There was a spring in her step that was lacking the last time they talked when her Grandmother visited the Isle of Skye.
"Where are you living now, Grandmother Lily?"
Ena was surprised to see her sitting in the kitchen when she came down to make breakfast. Of course the door was never locked and anyone was welcome to enter but it had been years since her Grandmother had paid them a visit, or anyone had, for that matter.
"I've discovered a small stone cabin on the east coast overlooking the sea. It reminds me of our home in Lake Baikal, plus I enjoy the solitude more these days than I ever did in the past."
"Where are Lady Lauren and Natalia?"
"I haven’t spoken to them in years, sweet Ena. I suppose they're still living at Orchardton Hall. Nothing could pull them away from that old moldy place."
A note of anger in resonated in Grandmother's voice at the mention of her old friends and lovers. Ena couldn’t help but notice how a throng of crows' feet had gathered around the edges of Grandmother Lily's eyes. Her once svelte body seemed to droop and sag in places like the pictures Ena once saw of old women who lived before the Great Dying.
"Are you feeling all right, Grandmother Lily?"
The words leaked out of their own accord even though Ena knew it was rude to ask such questions, especially of the Ladies. They were beyond age and the ravages of time or at least that's how she always perceived them. Now, though, she was seeing a future when her Grandmother sank into the depths of the Lake not to renew herself but to finish the diminishing.
"I am feeling the eons in ways I never thought possible. I don't understand why, however. Perhaps it has something to do with my sundering from Lady Lauren. We always seemed to feed off one another in ways I never fully realized until I was apart from her.
"We grew up together under the waters of Lake Baikal. Even when we came ashore we stayed by one another, until I was taken and imprisoned in England. Even then, we were only apart a short while. Now, it seems like centuries since we've kissed."
"Why don’t you go to her, Grandmother Lily? She must miss you too."
"When last we parted, it was in anger. She accused me of coming between her son and the love of a mother. Perhaps she was right. I felt so guilty that I left Kāne. He did not object to my going which only seemed to prove Lady Lauren's point.
"I don't belong anywhere, sweet Ena. I feel as lost as I did the first day I surfaced to walk along the shores of Lake Baikal naked and alone. If I am a bother here, please tell me to leave. It is not my wish to disturb you."
It broke her heart to hear Grandmother Lily's lament.
That night, she dreamed she too was an old lady lost in a storm. Lightning crashed all about her setting the forest ablaze and causing great cracks in the earth to open beneath her feet. She saw shadows standing on high walls watching her yet not offering a helping hand to save her. She tried to scream out but her voice was lost in the thunderous cacophony of the night. Suddenly something grabbed her from below, to pull her down to her doom. This time her scream resounded throughout the calamitous night that threatened to engulf her.
"Wake up, sweet Ena... you're having a nightmare!"
Alpin was next to her gently shaking her arm, reassuring her of reality.
Now, she feared her husband needed her help yet she was far away from him. If only she had told him of her plans perhaps they might be together now to hold one another once again.
The days at Cornell University were running together in ways that both disturbed her and enlightened her to their plight. The food was nearly gone. Only dried soup remained. It was also becoming clear that Micah's monsters were attempting to breech the building. She was beginning to wonder why they came here at all.
"I have a plan, my darling Daughter. It came to me during my meditations."
Father appeared at breakfast looking as if he hadn’t slept.
"What kind of preparations shall we make, my sweet Father?"
"First, I am hungry. Please feed me."
Chapter 42—Monkeys
Natalia was confused by what she saw.
They had traveled through the Chunnel dozens of times but always in a motorized vehicle and never stopping like this. The dark clamminess the walls exuded along with what she called the dead lights—cars pushed off the side of the maintenance road that still contained the old bones of their owners, chrome bumpers reflecting the headlights of their automobiles—conspired to lend a ghostly countenance to the ambiance of the never-ending tunnel deep beneath the North Sea.
She was wondering at the wisdom of traveling to Lake Baikal by horse and wagon. Lauren was right. They hadn’t a chance of making such a long trip in this manner. Her Gypsy parents were rogues and scoundrels who grew up on the road. For them, it was second nature. What did she know about this primitive mode of travel?
Something was moving among the ancient artifacts that once belonged to a world of light and love. It walked upright yet from the sounds it emitted and by judging its height, whatever it was it wasn’t human or a creature of the Lake.
She told herself the shadows inundating the walls and floor of the tunnel were elongated by the play of light, though there was no light to cast shadows. What she was seeing were a
nimals, enormously big, probably hungry, and fixated upon the wagon upon which they rode and its cargo of both food and living flesh.
She remembered reading stories during her school days of a monster in the Himalayan Mountains called a Yeti. Natalia told herself those stories were nothing but fables told by ignorant villagers who didn’t know any better. And yet she couldn’t seem to shake the notion that what she was seeing now resembled the descriptions in those old schoolbooks to such a degree that her nerves were nearly undone.
"We must hurry, sweet Lauren. We are not alone in here."
Though she could hardly see them she knew her lover's eyes were ablaze with the same alarm she felt. Lady Lauren jostled the reins and clicked her tongue to the draw horses urging them on yet they seemed tremulous to proceed, whinnying and stomping as if they too sensed danger both ahead and behind and unable to make a move.
"There is more than one of them stalking us, darling Natalia. We are being cut off both front and back. What are they?"
"Perhaps they're gorillas. Whatever they are, they walk upright."
"Are we are in danger, my lovely Natalia? Are we surrounded?"
They carried semi-automatic weapons and though Natalia hoisted one she was hesitant to actually fire upon the shadowy figures unless directly attacked. She couldn't help but wonder if the creatures were merely curious about the intruders inside the tunnel. She had no wish to harm another living creature needlessly.
"I don't know... I see nothing but shadows, my precious Lauren. If the horses will not move, perhaps we should abandon them. We could hide in one of the abandoned automobiles."
She shuddered at the thought of entering one of those horrid vehicles knowing what they contained. Before they could move and like magic the horses suddenly unleashed a flurry of hooves as they stampeded toward the dimming daylight only a kilometer ahead. Lady Lauren gave them the reins other than to gently tug them away from the train tracks that ran parallel on either side of the ancient maintenance road they were on.