The pipes that connected to the other end of the pump led back to the left, ending at a gigantic boiler. That explained the layout at least. Hot water was boiled here, went to the pump, which then sent it out to the rest of the facility. Red lights near the boiler and a collection of candles all over the room cast it in an almost demonic light. As I walked forward and turned the corner around the water pump, I realized that the candles were surrounding a table. There were white candles on the floor, white candles on the edges of the table, white candles on pipes, white candles on various free places. I couldn’t quite see what was on the table. It looked like a person or a mannequin was on the table. I walked closer for a better look.
One look had me retching in the corner, inadvertently putting out some of the candles. I didn’t have anything left in my stomach from the body I discovered in the library bathroom, so I wretched bile for a moment before fits of dry heaving. I don’t know how long it was, but I eventually recovered enough to stand up in this twisted place of horror. Was this some sort of unholy altar, a temple of murderous intentions, or was this just the best kept secret of some sick bastard? On the table was the body of a woman. At this point, just a dead body would not have brought on sickness. It’s what had been done to this body that made me ill. This body had been mutilated. Not just stabbed or pierced. Someone had mutilated this body with the patience and precision of a surgeon, carving flaps of skin, separating muscle from bone without hacking, draining off blood to give him room to work. The face had been transformed by a knife past the point of recognition, leaving it a skewed death mask with a grin made by sliced skin. I knew it was a woman only by the additional flesh that I assumed were breasts. Someone had taken this woman’s body and taken all humanity from it.
I felt myself feeling sick again and looked away. I stared at the swinging carcasses hanging from the ceiling. What was this place? It was the lair of a maniac, a monster. I looked around the area and found a lighter, some gloves, and a piece of brown leather. I picked up the leather and found that it was a knife holder, the sheaths of knives knitted into it. It was empty. There must have been at least a dozen slots for knives of various lengths and thickness, but none of the knives were there. The sudden thought hit me.
If the knives weren’t here, were they in use?
I spun quickly, searching the flickering light for a knife wielding maniac with a dozen knives. There was no one there, just flickering candles and swinging animal carcasses. Fear welled inside of me. I had been at some fucked up places in the last twenty four hours, but this was by far the most unholy. I just wanted to be out of that room. I didn’t want to be near that body, but even more so, I didn’t want to meet the room’s owner. I reached into my pocket and felt my gun. Even with that, I didn’t feel comfortable around the person who did what I saw on the table.
I needed to get out of there. I looked for another exit, but found only the door I came from. I turned to stare at that door, not wanting to go back through that heat. As I stared at it, I felt the strangest feeling behind me, all the hairs on the back of my neck standing straight up and a shiver going through my body from top to bottom. Slowly, almost not wanting to see what was there, I turned around. There was no one behind me, but what was there was no less strange: the boiler had changed. On the front of the boiler was now a large metal door. I was positive it had not been there before. This was a clean gunmetal-grey door. Unlike previous doors, this one was not rusted and ill-cared for. This door was new and clean. It was in stark contrast from the rest of this place.
I paused. Was the absent killer beyond that door? Or did that door lead to a place of deeper horror? Was this the killer’s frozen body locker? Why was there even a door on the boiler? Wouldn’t that open up into superheated water? I put my hand against the door; it was cool, in contrast to everything else in this room. It wasn’t cold like a freezer, just cool and unaffected by the heat in this room. I pulled the door open. In further contrast to the other doors, this opened easily, new and well-oiled. Beyond the door was night.
Night, not blackness like I had seen through so many other doors. I saw night, a dark sky full of stars and a moon that was full. I saw familiar stone stairs and scientific machines. I saw a place without blood and steam. Almost without thinking about it I stepped through the door, glad to be away from the place of death and mutilation. There was a strange sensation as I stepped through, like an invisible film was pulled away from me, leaving me in cold night standing on the stairs of a familiar pyramid. This maze of corridors and places had brought me back here again.
I stood on the steps of the Well.
The night air was refreshing after the boiler room and I breathed deeply. It was colder than the last time I was here. Stepping out of the door put me halfway up the pyramid and the wind whipped around me. Floodlights had been placed every few levels on the pyramid, so I did not have to worry about losing my footing in darkness. I looked down and saw the same trailers and machinery as before, but the site was empty. That wouldn’t be surprising, since I would guess the scientists didn’t work around the clock.
I looked behind me and saw the door hanging there in space. This was a surprise, as previously the doors either disappeared or closed behind me. Instead I saw a rectangular shape cut out of the space in front of me. It didn’t look into the boiler room as it did before. Now it looked into blackness. It was eerie to see the backside of a door hanging in space, but the blackness was familiar. I was not about to step back into it, so my next thought was where to now? Up the stairs or down them? I couldn’t just sit here on the steps. Well, I could, but it wouldn’t really get me anywhere.
I decided on Up. I didn’t expect there would be a way out of here, but I wanted to see what was on the top. That’s where the special part of this place had to be. The rest of it was just a regular pyramid, which is not to belittle the nature of pyramids. I just wasn’t sure why they would need all this machinery for simple archaeology. Something else was going on here, so I assumed it was happening up top. At the very least, maybe I could get a view of the surrounding area.
Climbing up, I caught a brief moment of a voice, but it was soon gone with the blowing of wind. A few more stairs up, I could hear more. By the time I was nearly at the top, I could hear that someone was speaking in cadence. The more I listened, the more I realized it was chanting. I couldn’t understand it, but I wasn’t sure if it was the wind interfering or if the language wasn’t English. I’ve never been too good with foreign languages, so it could in fact be Greek to me.
I reached the top of the steps, then stopped in my tracks at the top of the pyramid, confused by what I saw.
“Hey, I didn’t realize you two knew each other,” I finally said, waiting for a response that never came.
Max stood on the top of the pyramid, reading aloud from a large book in that undulating cadence I heard. I couldn’t understand what he was saying, but he was passionate about it. His hair wasn’t disheveled like in the hospital, it was relatively well kept. He wore his lab coat, which I could see had blood on its shoulder, though I did not see a wound on him. He stood in front of a stone table in front of a gaping hole that seemed to be part of the pyramid itself. There were a strange variety of objects on the stone table, including at the most grotesque a severed human arm. Some of the objects on the table were glowing, but at the moment, I had other concerns. Like Katie.
Near the table of glowing objects sat Katie, staring raptly at Max’s impassioned reading of the book he held. She sat in a simple chair, her arms slack at her sides. Even though I had spoken, neither reacted to my presence, Max engaged trancelike in his reading, Katie staring straight forward at him. Ignoring the glowing objects as I passed them, I went to Katie.
“Katie, I’m so glad I found you!” I said when I stood next to her.
No response. No flicker of her eyes, no turn of her head. It was like she didn’t even hear me.
“Katie, are you okay?”
Still no response. Now I beg
an to wonder if she had reverted to her catatonic state. I waved my fingers in front of her face and her eyes did not even react to my movement. Great, I thought, we’re back to this. I didn’t like Catatonic Katie nearly as much as Awake With Color Commentary Katie. I had actually started to miss her cursing. I didn’t want to go back to leading her around again.
I ran my hand through my hair. “Dammit Katie, what happened? What put you back in this? I thought that the Well was what woke you up.”
I looked back at the glowing objects. I really should figure out what’s up with those, I thought. Instead I turned back to Katie. “We were doing okay, weren’t we? Sure there were monsters, but we were getting out of this place. Together, right?” I looked around, thinking it was futile to mention getting out of the mental hospital when we were currently on the top of a strange pyramid in some undisclosed location.
“Dammit, what happened when we were separated? Something must have put you back in that state.” I looked her over, looking for scrapes or cuts, some clue to hardship that happened since we had gotten separated such a short time ago. She had different clothes. I had left her in sweatpants and the sneakers she had taken from the half faced person in the library. Now she had nice pants and shoes. “You had to have found someplace safe. At least safe enough for you to feel like you could change clothes and spike your hair.”
Wait, spike her hair?
I looked at her hair again. It was shorter and spiked with some hair gel… mousse… or some other styling product. It was spiky in opposition to gravity, that’s all I knew. But it was shorter than when I last saw her. I looked back at Max. His hair was shorter than in the hospital as well. It was similar in length to the last time we saw him here at the Well. I looked back at Katie. She seemed to be wearing some makeup as well, not that she needed it. It was possible that Katie got a full fashion makeover since I last saw her, but it seemed so unlikely. It had been maybe two hours, more like an hour since I last saw her. My sense of time has never been great, but unless time had been running differently for her, it just didn’t seem like enough time. Then again, we’d been travelling through time, so there’s no reason that she couldn’t have found the time.
In a flash I knew what I was missing, I knew what was going on. This wasn’t my Katie. It was still Katie, but it wasn’t my Katie. It wasn’t the Katie I knew. This was Katie from the past. Katie had admitted she was at the Well before and that it had been the very thing that had driven her to catatonia. And here she was catatonic at the Well with shorter hair and a Max. I was in the past and Katie was part of this past. The Katie I knew was lost, running around somewhere in time, but this was not her. This was a ghost from the past, a reminder of who she used to be.
Staring at her, I was reminded of the real Katie. Though her eyes were vacant and her jaw slack, this was the girl who would become Katie. She was punkier with her hair and her makeup, but the same girl was there, locked inside her own mind. What did she see? What happened here to force her deep inside herself?
Suddenly her head whipped around to look at me, her eyes jet black. Her eyes were so dark, like the blackest pit at the bottom of the universe. And that pit had called my name. In a distorted voice that was a mix of hers and something else, something much deeper, she said, “KEATS.”
I stumbled backwards, my blood immediately ice, my heart racing. The sound was like experiencing a nightmare.
“JOHN KEATS,” the voice from her mouth continued. “WE ARE USING THIS VESSEL TO SPEAK TO YOU. THIS PLACE IS CLOSE TO YOU.”
I wanted to avoid the voice, I wanted to run far away. Every animal instinct said to run, but something held me fixed in place. And yet somehow, I was able to answer.
“Who are you?” I asked. When I looked in those eyes... it was like looking into my own death. I tried not to stare directly at that which was not Katie.
“UNIMPORTANT,” said the twin voices. “YOU, THE KEATS, ARE IMPORTANT."
"M-me? Who am I?"
"THAT WILL BECOME EVIDENT IN TIME. YOU MUST REMAIN UNDAMAGED. AT THIS POINT IN TIME, YOU MUST STOP MAX."
I turned and looked at Max; it was such a relief to tear my vision from not-Katie. Max was still chanting from the book. The glow from the table was brighter. I looked back at not-Katie. “Stop Max? What is he doing?”
“FORGETTING. IF YOU FORGOT EVERYTHING THAT HURT YOU, EVERYTHING THAT MADE YOU LESS, EVERYTHING THAT HELD YOU BACK, YOU WOULD BE MORE THAN A MAN. FORGET THAT YOU ARE A MAN AND YOU WILL BECOME A GOD."
“What?”
“STOP HIM, JOHN KEATS.” The voice was growing steadily weaker. “THIS PLACE IS MOVING OUT OF ALIGNMENT. STOP HIM, JOHN KEATS. WE WILL TALK AGAIN.” Then the voice trailed off. Katie’s eyes drained of all blackness, back to her vacant green. Her head slowly turned back to staring straight ahead of her.
The cold fear I felt drained away as the voice disappeared and Katie's eyes turned back. Fear gave way to a tired confusion. What had just happened? It was like I was being drunk dialed from the Twilight Zone. Something (I still felt it was something rather than someone) was trying to tell me something, something that I clearly did not understand. Why were they even trying to tell me? The black eyes and creepy voice did not say “good Samaritan” to me. It sounded more diabolical than angelic. The chill that seeped through my body while it spoke did not do anything to allay my concerns. I didn’t understand what it said, but even more so, I didn’t understand why it wanted to help me. Who the hell was I? I thought pretty well of myself, but let’s be realistic for once: why did I matter? How many alien consciousnesses do I even appear on the radar of?
It scared the utter crap out of me. It scares me more because it said we'd meet again one day.
I don't want that day to ever come.
I looked back at Katie, watching her now slack and catatonic face. I saw light cast on her face. I turned and saw a white pinpoint of light in the center of the table in front of her. As I watched, it grew bigger. Immediately my danger sense went off, full alarm. Something was definitely wrong. Not the washing-machine-made-your-white-shirt-pink wrong. I’m talking barking-cats-are-the-new-overlords-of-the-human-race wrong. It was not just that I visually saw the light growing larger, though that was alarming. I felt something. Something very strong. Something very alien. Things were about to go very sour.
I looked around. Mystical pyramid, check. Max standing there chanting odd words from a book, check. Stone table that could be an altar, check. Glowing objects and severed human arm, check. Catatonic Katie, check. Glowing light hanging in space, check. I had seen enough Sci-Fi movies to know that there was no way this would work out well. Definitely time to go. I had already had to deal with enough weird shit, pillars of light, monsters, and murders. This seemed to be somewhere I didn’t want to be.
Turning to leave, I paused. Katie was here. It was the Katie of the past, but still Katie. She was made catatonic by this. The Katie I knew had been through this, and while she survived, it had royally fucked her up. I was here again. Could I save her? Could I bring her with me? What could I change in the past? Should I change the past? There were paradoxes for sure. If I took this Katie with me, what would happen to the Katie I knew? If I took this Katie, that means she wouldn’t end up at the hospital. If she didn’t end up at the hospital, I wouldn’t be sent to find her. If I weren’t sent to find her I wouldn’t end up here and able to save her. So if I saved her, would it undo my saving her? More importantly, how would I get paid?
My head hurt with the possibilities and implications. The white light was getting bigger and brighter. But what about Katie? Shouldn’t I save her if I could? I stood frozen in indecision. I didn’t want to leave her here, but I wanted to get the hell out of here. It turns out my decision was about to be made for me.
Katie’s head whipped toward me, her eyes black again. That same combined distorted voice shouted at me: “GO!” It shivered through my body.
I needed no more encouragement. I turned and ran from the top of the pyramid,
white light growing very bright behind me, the chanting growing even louder. Max was screaming now. I thought it was strange I hadn’t noticed his voice rising. I ran down the steps, looking down at the area around the Well. I didn’t see it before, but with the extra light cast by the pyramid top, I could see things I could not see before. There were bodies of scientists lying all around the pyramid. Blood splotches covered their white coats. I swore as I slowed down near the door hanging in space. The top of the pyramid had some definite bad mojo going on. The bottom of the pyramid had a bunch of corpses. None of these appealed to me. I looked at the darkness of the door. I knew what I’d find in there. The falling, the living room, that poor boy. It was vague in my mind, fuzzy, but I knew I hated experiencing it each time. But it was familiar, a known quantity. I knew it was ultimately safe. This place was not.
Looking back, my logic didn’t make a lot of sense. Maybe it was a man running away. Maybe it was just a man pushed to wit’s end. Maybe I didn’t want to admit to myself that a flipped a coin. Whatever I might rationalize it as, the result was still the same. I stepped through the doorway into darkness.
Thirteen
TRANSCRIPT: OBSERVATION ROOM 6. PATIENT 457, NURSE DAVIS, NURSE JOHNSON. ATTENDING PHYSICIAN: DR. ASHBORN.
DOCTOR: Please administer the stimulant.
PATIENT: No! No! Please no!
DOCTOR: Please relax and allow the stimulant to do its work.
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