by Неизвестный
The extraction of the human soul from a living body was a truly gruesome process to behold. It was achieved by a kind of electromagnetic suction. The soul, it seems, responds to copious (and I mean copious) amounts of electromagnetism, drawn to it like a cold, pale face to a warm summer sun.
The poor, unfortunate person was placed in the centre of a small Chamber. Seated and strapped in, the condemned person had an apex of enormous power suspended above his/her head. The jet-black surface of The Chamber seemed to absorb light and give nothing back, which served to show its true purpose: to take that which could not be given back. It had titanium steel walls that were at least three feet thick. The only way to see in was through a small window at the front that had reinforced glass in it.
When that person heard the whirring sound of the electromagnet charging up, they knew that pain was about to visit them in a way they have never felt before – the pain of the un-godly extraction.
I’ve seen this process in action. I’ve seen the despair in the condemned person’s face, the vacant look of the eyes. All hope abandoned. Next stop Hell – a Hell created by humans, though, not God or Satan.
It was a slow process, although how long it took varied. It took about three hours, usually. Three hours of immense pain, as the soul was gradually raised out of the hosts quivering body. The ultimate execution of the physical being: eyes bulging; hair standing erect; hands white-knuckle gripped to the chair arms; deep lines crevassed across a face expressing an unimaginable agony.
The only thing I can compare it to is the electric chair… but a lot worse.
The soul: a glimmering shimmering apparition of immeasurable beauty; a true example of a seemingly surreal semi-reality; formless yet perfect in its raw splendour; God’s finest work of art, unequalled by the hand of man.
Once the soul had been extracted, the body was sectioned off and removed.
The soul, however, had another destination. It took a short journey to a place that could be comparable to Hell… but was maybe even worse? It was siphoned into a huge electromagnetic Chamber, which was essentially a deep, black chasm.
It was a prison, but a prison that had no bars, no cells, no guards, and no walls to escape over. Just a small team of staff to monitor the electromagnetic levels, and make sure that everything was running smoothly.
The inmates of this very “special” prison shared a very intimate existence with one another. This punishment was reserved for only the lowest scum of society: serial killers, rapists, and paedophiles. If they weren’t insane before their incarceration, they certainly were after a few years of being locked up with the world’s evilest psychos.
Eventually, the government was sure a way could be found to destroy their souls, rid humanity of their evil for eternity. But maybe only God could administer this ultimate justice? Maybe only he possessed that divine power?
All the worst criminals, the lifers, were taken from their normal prisons and subjected to the horrors of The Chamber. This resulted in the closure of a lot of prisons, and the saving of a lot of taxpayers’ money. The public, sceptical at first, were beginning to warm to the idea of the ultimate punishment.
The implementation of the 100% full proof lie detector test in 2050 meant that there were no more wrongful convictions. Hence, nobody was sent to The Chamber that didn’t deserve to go there.
After a while, order seemed to be returning to the streets. The statistics produced by the government showed that crime had fallen by 80% in the six-month period following the ultimate punishments introduction. The risk was just too high for most, it seemed.
A new world utopia beckoned humanity. An end to the haphazard chaos of ages past but not forgotten, and the future shone like a guiding, resplendent beacon of hope… until…
16th November 2107: shockwaves of fear reverberated around the globe when news channels worldwide announced that there had been a power failure at The Chamber.
The ‘accident’ seemed a little too suspicious for most people. Maybe it was an act of terrorism. And maybe it was an accident, an act of gross incompetence, perhaps. Who knows? The only important thing was that with The Chamber had lost power… and that meant that there was nothing to hold in all those restless souls – those restless, vengeful souls.
When the main power supply failed, an emergency generator was supposed to kick in. This was to give them a day – at least – to get the main power restored, but that failed, too. The thick steel walls of The Chamber were no barrier to an entity with no physical substance or form.
When they restored the power, The Chamber was empty. Most people thought, hoped, that these sick souls would have finally ended up in their rightful place … Hell. But it couldn’t be that easy, could it?
God could have intervened, taken these souls to their final destination… but He didn’t.
And it seems that God wasn’t the only one who mankind managed to offend, to enrage. The Devil could have opened up the gates of Hell and welcomed some of his most dedicated apostles of carnage, and let them take their rightful place by his side. He must have been enraged at mankind for withholding his followers from him. The Devil wanted revenge, I’m sure, and he took it.
On the 16th November 2107, God looked down from Heaven, His angels sat by His side, and for the first time in history, He turned His back on humanity.
Hell on Earth became a reality.
They were loose. They were amongst us. They were invincible.
How long before the killing starts, everyone wondered? Not long. Within a few hours, reports started filling the news channels of strange apparitions, sightings, throughout the world. Ghostly apparitions which could take on different forms: one a shimmering splendour; the other, more alarmingly, a semi-physical form.
For a while, it seemed, they were enjoying their newfound freedom, exploring the new reality that they now lived in. Marvelling at their own immortality, free from the physical constraints they had endured throughout life. This, however, didn’t last long.
It wasn’t long before their bloodthirsty work began. They killed indiscriminately. The sound of lunatic laughter pervaded the air … along with the screams of their victims. Insanity ruled.
As mortals these men were dangerous, as immortals they were unstoppable.
It wasn’t long before the news channels couldn’t cope with the influx of reports they were receiving. The true extent of the killing was all too evident, though, because no one was far from the carnage. The screams of the mortal, the ignorant, filled the world.
The army and police were powerless, their weapons useless. Bullets went straight through the Soul Survivors.
The world slipped into its final, eternal dark age.
***
I’m sat in my office waiting for the inevitable. He’ll be here soon, I know he will, and I know he’ll make my death painful … unless one of the other Soul Survivors beats him to it, that is. Whoever it is, I just hope they come soon and get it over and done with.
But I think he will come first …
His name is Charles Limond, otherwise known as The Butcher of Blacktop. During his illustrious twenty-five years of life, he killed sixteen people. He had a thing for the eyes, you see. He used to scoop them out of the victim’s head … while they were still alive.
So why would this guy want to kill me? Because I was the one who took his soul, that’s why. I was the one who pushed the button. I was the one who looked into his eyes and watched him endure pain beyond belief.
Limond was the first person ever to have his soul removed. He was the guinea pig that we experimented on. An expendable piece of trash that no one, not even his mother, would miss.
His final words to me were, “We’ll be seein’ each other again, Tom … real soon.”
He tipped me a wink, and I threw the switch… thinking that I’d had the last laugh.
But he who laughs last, laughs the loudest, and…
“Well… well… well,’ he says, appearing from nowhere, ‘I
told you I’d be seein’ you again, didn’t I?”
“Look, I’m sorry for what h-happened, all right, but I ha -”
“SHUT UP!”
He shimmers in and out of reality, a resplendent apparition with a multitude of colours pervading his presence. He is a glimmering spectrum of immortal luminescence… fading… solidifying… fading… solidifying…
“Please don’t kill me,” I plead.
“You and me are gonna have some fun, Tom. Let me introduce you to my friend.”
The knife he pulls out looks razor sharp, its serrated edge glinting under the powerful beam of the overhead fluorescents.
He looks deep into my eyes, the windows to my soul. “I’ve always had a thing about green eyes, you know. Your emerald greens will make a nice start to my new collection, don’t you think?”
I close my eyes, cringe, and wait for the inevitable. And as his cold, clammy hands close around my neck, I wait to see what will happen to my soul after I’m dead.
Maybe the Devil will open up the gates of Hell for me …
A Splitting Headache
By Ilan Lerman
God my head hurts.
It feels like it’s going to just pop from the end of my neck like a firework.
I’ve had this bubble of pain growing deep inside my skull for so long, it feels like an eternity. It’s the worst migraine headache that I’ve ever had, and I’ve had my fair share.
First time was in the school playground. I was only fifteen. A rolling mass of cloud had swallowed most of the light and rain was falling. Rain like you wouldn’t believe. Huge, fat drops that hit the ground like gunfire.
It had been a glorious June day only minutes before, but the heat was now trapped under the cloud cover and all the kids were packed under the shelter next to the assembly hall doors.
It felt like the walls were sweating. The odour of a hundred teenagers choked the air. The cheese smell of sweat. The sour, vomit stench of someone’s breath right next to my face.
There was an explosion of light inside my head and everything melted into a blur. As my eyes steadily began to refocus, the light explosion had coalesced into a tiny shimmering point on my vision. The echoing chatter of the kids became muffled and a whining tone filled my ears.
I could hear my old mate Robert trying to speak to me. His voice sounded like it was coming from the other side of a wall and I had to press my ear up against it to hear him.
“You alright, Andy?” His face was destroyed by the point of light. Wherever I wanted to look, it was right there. ‘You don’t look so good.’
The shimmering little point on my vision would not shift. I blinked and blinked, closing my eyes to try and dull it the way a vision spot from a light bulb dims eventually. It only seemed to intensify, growing larger and spreading until I could see that it was a golden, crystalline structure with tiny cells that split and multiplied like zygotes.
It actually makes me smile when I think about how scared I was at the time. I thought I was going blind, or having a brain haemorrhage.
It’s only now that I know the meaning of real fear.
I ran from the playground, my heart thumping in my throat. My house was only a ten-minute walk from the school, but it was just a five-minute dash up Victoria Road with my legs fuelled by panic.
By the time I crashed through my front door my entire vision was subsumed by the shimmering crystal structure. I could still see through it to a certain extent. It was like peering into the heart of a brilliant-cut diamond and seeing the world beyond shattered into points of colour and fire.
I buried myself into the darkness of my bedroom, sweating and shaking, trying not to burst into tears.
My vision began to clear and the lights melted to the edge of my eyes, pulsing away in blooms of purple and yellow and green.
Then the headache came.
Slicing out from the back of my eye sockets and up through my head. It felt like clothes pegs had been pinched onto my optic nerves. It was teeth being wrenched out with no anaesthetic.
The pain was the whole universe and I floated in it alone.
It was a year before I had another migraine, but something changed after that first one. Nothing would be the same again.
We lived in Glasgow, in a three bedroom flat on the first floor of a Victorian yellow sandstone tenement on Langside Road.
It was just Mum, me and Alice the lodger, a plump middle-aged divorcee that Mum had known for years who occupied the spare room. Our whole area was a grid of streets lined with sandstone tenements. Some were yellow like ours and some a pink-tinged red. Most had been cleaned up in a massive council drive to tidy up the city, but the further east you went the more you could find still coated in one hundred and fifty years of black soot.
The day after the headache, Mum had kept me off school just in case. Later on that day I had ventured out to the shops and that was when I noticed it.
The tenements had changed colour overnight. The ones on our street were now blue and the others that were supposed to be red had turned green.
That wasn’t all. They now looked like cartoon versions of buildings. The detail in the stone which used to be pockmarked and crumbling was smooth and bright; lined in bold colour and glowing like it had been freshly rendered with acrylic paint on white canvas.
When I first described what I was seeing to Mum, she rushed me to the hospital and I was subjected to all manner of tests. Doctor Bell checked me for retinal and optic nerve damage; for occipital lobe epilepsy; for some acquired form of dichromatic colour blindness. They found nothing, despite all their gadgets and long words. They were missing one important factor.
It was only the buildings that appeared different to me.
I had no other symptoms of colour blindness and nothing they told me, no amount of lights shone in my eyes, wires attached to my temples or tests with numbers written in coloured dots could explain the way the buildings looked. Those smooth, garish primary colours radiated out as though they were shining from some alien world.
“There is nothing intrinsically wrong with you, Andrew,” said Doctor Bell, “it may be some visual hangover from the migraine you had. Colour blindness has been associated, in some rare cases, with migraine headaches.”
Nothing more was said about it by Mum. It was a taboo subject and we carried on with our lives as though everything was perfectly normal. Except that it wasn’t.
I took to wearing sunglasses, whatever the weather. Anything to shut out those colours. They were wrong. They didn’t belong in this world and I couldn’t stand to see them any longer.
As it turned out, I only had to wait a year.
***
The second headache came on a day like any other. There was nothing to mark that day as any more stressful or bizarre as the ones preceding it, but as I sat in my room reading a book, it started again.
This time there was no explosion of light to herald its arrival, just the pinprick of shimmering crystals appearing over the words I was trying to read. It was like someone had punched a hole in the skin of reality and all this formless, glittering chaos was bleeding in.
The doctor had warned me to take as many painkillers as I legitimately could, then find somewhere dark to lie down and wait it out.
I swallowed paracetamol and codeine, and then plunged into my bed. It was a Saturday afternoon, Mum and Alice were out shopping in the city centre. Buildings all across the city appeared to me in the same nauseating colours and I had stopped going out whenever possible, electing to stay in and do the things that difficult teenagers are supposed to do. Like sleeping all day, watching TV for hours and never opening my curtains.
There was no doubt that the pills dulled my pain receptors to begin with. The shimmering pattern had faded as before and I could feel the pressure building up inside my head. There was no stopping the rollercoaster. The pills had slowed it down as it crept to the top of the track, but then it dropped me screaming into an abyss. I actually felt weightles
s as the pain scythed its way out from behind my eyes and clutched my skull, crushing, pounding.
Deep inside my brain, I swore I could feel a tiny grain pop into existence, somewhere within the folds and layers of thought. It was like a wood splinter embedded under skin.
I writhed around on the bed for what must have been hours, drifting in and out of consciousness. I was battling through fever dreams that endlessly repeated themselves where I was floating in a void, and had to rearrange my memories into scenes that had meaning, but the more I tried to create sense from them, the more I confused them with my dreams and nightmares and fantasies until nothing made sense anymore.
When I finally awoke it was pitch dark. I must have slept right through into the night, but surely Mum would have come to see me when she got back? I had no memory of hearing the front door creak on its hinges the way it normally did when she came home.
I stumbled out of bed and into the darkness.
The first thing I noticed that was different was the suffocating heat that choked me as I tried to breathe. It felt like a sauna, except the steam smelled dirty. A dank, yeasty mushroom smell.
There was also the fact that I couldn’t see a thing. My eyes usually adjusted to the light within a minute. There was always some residual amber glow from the streetlights outside, but the darkness in the room was complete. I thought I’d actually gone blind this time.
Then I found the door handle and pulled it open.
Light had found its way onto the edges of things in the hallway; a shifting light that came from beneath the living room door. The low murmur of the TV was audible.
I also heard another noise. A deep drumming sound, low down, vibrating through the floor. Then a pause. Followed by what sounded like grunting. Not the friendly munching snort of a pig. It was a guttural, belligerent grunt and it came from something massive.