There were trees in my path and I prepared myself for the impact, but it never came. The landscape became transparent and I phased through it and countless others: deserts with sand in a myriad impossible colours, oceans with viscous liquid, forests with strange trees, barren wastelands and parched scrublands, and innumerable worlds that contained things I had no language to describe or previous experience to even begin to understand in the scant few seconds I inhabited them.
Each, though, I noted with confusion, was as empty as my own. Or as empty as I’d thought my own had been, anyway.
Pain blossomed around me as I fell back into my body. I hadn’t eaten since before my appointment, and my stomach was angrily making me aware of this fact. The doorbell was ringing, its dissonant chime scraping against my eardrums.
I pulled myself off of my bed and shook my head, trying to clear it, to make any kind of sense of the bizarre events that had befallen me. The doorbell persisted, though, with an urgency that I could feel throughout my bones. It was clear that the only way to get the godawful racket to stop was to answer the door, so I stumbled groggily across my tiny apartment, glad of its miniscule size for the first time in my life.
I’m not sure who I was expecting—Mormons, maybe—but it certainly wasn’t Marjorie.
“Hi, Ainsley.” She smiled at me, as though this was a normal thing, as though she came over to my house all the time.
Maybe this was just another side effect. I blinked, long and hard, squeezing my eyes together in desperation. I wanted her to be real, but...
Wait, no. No, this was too fucked up. I didn’t want her to be real, because that would involve too many fucking weird questions that I’d need to ask her. I wanted this to be a side effect, because then I could pull her to me and we could have sex for hours and hours and I wouldn’t have to worry about why she was here or anything else. I’d lose myself in her body and maybe this time when I died I’d actually die, tangled in her limbs, skin on sweaty skin. It wouldn’t even matter that it wasn’t really her, because who is really anyone? You exist in my universe the way I see you. There’s no room for what you think about yourself in my world.
“I’m still here, Ainsley.”
I opened my eyes. I wasn’t sure why I’d closed them in the first place. Blinking never got rid of side effects before.
“What are you doing here?” I said it quietly, suddenly not the bastion of self-confidence I’d pretended to be with her earlier.
She smiled, warm and soothing, barefoot through dry grass. She said something. It didn’t matter. I was running under the hot sun, my hair floating in the breeze, air deliciously cool on the back of my sweat-covered neck.
Babylon sex was better than I ever could have imagined. The visions were the same quality as the ones I had when I used the Engine by myself, but instead of empty alien vistas, I was drawn into Marjorie’s memories, a sort of liquid pool where they flowed together in strange, nonsensical and breathtakingly gorgeous ways.
And it wasn’t just the things that had happened to her, it was things she’d wanted, things she’d dreamed: she was riding bareback on a horse through hot, dry prairie fields and now it was a unicorn, and now a Pegasus, and she was flying through a starry sky, her hair billowing behind her.
As my lips caressed her flesh, I tasted her soul, drank in her very essence. Complete intimacy. I knew her now, in a way that no one else ever had, and no one else ever would. No matter what happened afterwards, parts of her would still be mine and mine alone, uncharted by past and future lovers.
Hours later, I disentangled myself from her sleeping form to check on the Engine. It was off. What did that mean? Probably nothing – I had side effects from it when it was off all the time. It was her or it wasn’t her, and I’d probably never know for certain. My body was still thrumming from the sensory overload.
“Is that it, the thing you were talking about? The thing you made.” I’d felt Marjorie get up, but I wanted her to find me like this, to see me at work.
“Yeah,” I said, with the pride of a parent watching their child at an awards ceremony. “The Babylon Engine.”
“What does it do?”
I laughed. Marjorie, so innocent. She’s a doctor, she’s supposed to know so many things, and yet here she is, asking me questions like what does it do?
“It’s not like that, Marjorie. It’s not what it does, it’s what you do. It changes the vibration in the surroundings on a quantum level. This allows your body to function at a different frequency, opening up new senses.”
“This is why you were experiencing the colours, and the, the...”
“Vignettes. Yes. This is why. And this is also why I have been seeing new worlds.” I tried to sound scholarly, rather than smug, but the expression of awe in her eyes made me feel powerful and intelligent, and I could feel my ego stretching to mammoth proportions.
“How did you know how to make it?” Her voice was full of wonder, like a child seeing fireworks for the first time.
“I read some books. There was a website—it’s gone now—it had some instructions. But really, a lot of it was trial and error. You’re seeing this after five years of hard work, of soldering and re-soldering and smashing and breaking. This is not finished by any means, but it’s a lot less...rudimentary than it was. I noticed that one of the tubes was burnt out, so I unscrewed it.
“Vacuum tubes? I didn’t even know you could get those anymore.”
“You can get anything on the internet,” I smirked. I handed Marjorie the spent tube. “See the powder in there?” I shook it, agitating the grey dust inside. “I want to get it tested. I’m certain that there’s something significant about it. I’ve kept every tube I’ve ever used, along with a log of what happened when I used it. There could be differences in the composition. I’m still a bit short on research funds, though. Lab analysis is expensive. Maybe you could help me out with that?”
“Ainsley,” Marjorie said, love and admiration spilling from her eyes, “this is amazing.”
“I know,” I said, snaking my arms around her naked waist, fingers exploring, caressing, penetrating.
“Show me how it works,” she breathed as she craned her neck to kiss me. “Show me how it feels for you.”
I turned it on and sank into her flesh.
I awoke to find Marjorie doing lines of vacuum tube powder in the bathroom, one of the crates resting on the closed lid of the toilet seat. Three empty tubes were lined up in a neat row on the counter by the sink.
“The fuck are you doing?” I grabbed the crate, wrapping my arms around it protectively.
Marjorie smiled a grin that threatened to crack her face in two. “Oh, Ainsley,” she said. “You didn’t think this was real, did you?”
My knees rebelled against me. I sank slowly to the floor. “I...I had thought maybe...maybe it didn’t matter,” I whispered.
Marjorie put down the thin glass straw she’d been using for railing the vacuum tube dust and came to me, encircling me with her arms, lifting my chin to look into her eyes.
“It doesn’t matter, Ainsley. It doesn’t matter at all. We—I—come here and have these little adventures with you, and you make us drugs in return. You have fun, we have fun. Who needs real?” She kissed my forehead lovingly.
“I’ve done this before?” I scoured my memories, but all I could come up with was this time, this one time.
Marjorie stroked my cheek. “Many times.”
“Why don’t I remember it?”
“You don’t need to. It doesn’t matter. All that matters is that you’re happy. We give you these experiences, and each one gives us a different high. When you’ve been angry, it gives us strength and energy. When you’re scared, it makes us feel like we can do things faster. When we’ve had sex, it’s more relaxing.” She kissed me softly.
I wondered how long it went back, how many of my memories were actually mine and not just a trick to make me feel whatever way they wanted to make drugs from me. When that thing
talked to me while I was in Babylon it certainly felt like a turning point, but maybe it wasn’t. Maybe it started when I first built the damned thing.
I tried to remember why I had built it. I’d read something about altered states of consciousness and had come across a few different, contradictory and confusing plans for the Engine on the internet, though when I tried to send the links to others, the web pages had all inexplicably vanished. The Engine sounded like something I could build and use to quantify and map the esoteric, becoming a pioneer in metaphysical research. I even changed its name from A075-39HO-Q to Babylon, invoking the Enochian goddess in a strange mixture of ego and reverence. But was that really me? Were those really my thoughts? Was that something I’d actually wanted, or was it something that I’d been told I’d wanted? Had there even been websites?
When I was a child, I caught some of the older kids in the neighbourhood stomping on caterpillars. I’d like to say that it was concern for the caterpillars’ right to live that forced me to intervene, but really it was that they were in my yard and I didn’t want to have to look at mulched bugs every time I went to play. Daniel, the oldest, explained gently (because at his eight years old, four year old me was still a baby) that there was a kind of wasp that laid its eggs inside caterpillars. This process didn’t kill them, at least not right away. The caterpillar went on eating leaves and believing that everything was perfect until the day when the eggs hatched and it was eaten alive from the inside out by hungry wasp larvae. You could see the wasp eggs on the caterpillars, and so he and his friends were killing the infected ones as a kindness to them, because a quick death was surely better than the horror of slowly being consumed.
When did the—whatever Marjorie was—when did that implant its seed into me? Was there ever a Marjorie? Was I even in my house, or was all of this just an illusion to keep me producing drugs for them? Was I the only one or were there more people like me? Did they have farms full of us, hallucinating in pens like drugged-up cattle?
I stopped by the kitchen on the way back to the bedroom. There were knives in the block. If I was fast, I could grab one. I could kill her. I could kill myself, and then I’d be free, free of the infection. Free to feel my own emotions on my own terms, free to not be fed off of and used.
I pulled the biggest knife out of the block, its blade gleaming in the soft glow of the streetlight that shone in through the open kitchen window. This morning, Marjorie had been my hero. She was the one who was going to help me make this whole stupid experiment mean something. She was the one I wanted to save me, to love me. I wanted her to tear down the dark clouds that surrounded me, and I suppose she did, but instead of light behind the clouds there was an even more profound darkness.
Marjorie was reclining on the bed when I entered the room, pinup style. When she saw the knife in my hand, her body tensed and her eyes turned yellow.
“It won’t work,” she said, but it wasn’t her, it was that thing again, the thing from Babylon, talking right into my head. “It never does.”
“What’s the point?” I asked.
Laughter poured directly into my head. I stabbed her. Again and again, the knife keeping time like a drum beat, her laughter combining with my staccato beats in a grotesque harmony. I didn’t stop, not until I was covered in her blood, until her abdomen was a pulpy mess, until the laughter stopped reverberating through my head.
I stumbled blindly towards the shower, as though cleaning her body off of me would make this better, as though there was any way to stop this madness. As the hot water poured over me, I wondered how I was supposed to handle this. Who do I call? An ambulance? The police? Did I kill Marjorie or just the resonation Marjorie? Was there a difference? The blood and tissue that spiraled down the drain looked real enough, but so had the wheat that I was running through when she’d talked to me, and that definitely wasn’t real. Or was it? Maybe I was that child running through the wheat and this was the illusion.
My stomach lurched. I curled up in the bottom of the shower, my body wracked with tearless, impotent sobs. I felt for the knife but I couldn’t find it. I’d left it in the bedroom, I guessed, but it didn’t matter now. I didn’t want to kill myself anymore: I didn’t want anything but Marjorie, any Marjorie, even the drug addicted not-Marjorie whose mutilated body was slowly seeping into my mattress.
When my wobbling knees finally agreed to carry my weight, I turned off the shower and absently dried off on the worn towel that still carried not-Marjorie’s lavender scent from when she used it earlier. I could still taste the spicy-sweet flavour of her body on my lips.
I shuffled to the bedroom, hoping against hope that Marjorie’s body would have magically disappeared while I was gone. It—she—was still there, waiting patiently for me, her hair splayed out on the pillow like a crude halo. I pulled the sheets up over her so that they covered her to her neck. I closed her eyes gently.
Tears came to me finally, in a bitter flood of self-pity. I crawled on top of the comforter, curling up around her cooling body and cried until I fell into sleep’s black abyss.
I jolted into consciousness, agitated but confused, adrenaline coursing through my veins. I couldn’t shake the feeling that someone else was here and something terrible had happened. That there was nothing out of place and no one else in my bedroom did nothing to stifle the suffocating unease that was quickly overwhelming me.
“It’s fine,” I whispered to myself, as though saying it would make it true. “There’s no one here.”
I ran to the kitchen and grabbed the biggest knife from the knife block. Emboldened by its reassuring weight in my hands, I crept around my apartment, checking every possible hiding place. There was no prowler crouching in my closet. No burglar waited for me behind the shower curtain. My apartment was empty but for me and the comforting mass of the Babylon Engine.
I jumped and screamed in terror when the doorbell rang then laughed, ashamed. There really wasn’t anyone else here. Nothing was wrong. I sighed with relief, pulling my robe tighter around myself, then opened the door.
Marjorie stood on my doorstep, hair shimmering in the afternoon sun, more beautiful than even the most idealized portrait I’d drawn.
“Hi Ainsley,” she smiled at me, as though this was a normal thing, as though she came over to my house all the time.
THE HAPPINESS MACHINE
Edward Morris
I’ve been in the writing game a good few years in this part of the world, and borne the thousand and one insults of Jason Tillinghast as best I could. But when he brought his great-uncle’s machine to PanCon (the Pacific Northwest Science Fiction Convention, the big one they always have at the Seattle Hilton every year) my first impulse was to knock him out cold. Or snag the cart with the machine on it and run. Or something.
Something. I’ve been to a lot of literary conventions, as a writer and a volunteer. I write in a lot of different genres, and I care about all of them. Since I was nineteen and starry-eyed and listening to the late Ray Harryhausen regale me about the early days of special-effects work from mere feet away, it is the moments between the Cons that speak to me the most, and fill me with wonder and purpose.
I met Harryhausen in an elevator at Readercon. I made the late Lucius Shepard laugh out loud once in another elevator, and I’ll cherish that forever. In a third elevator, the very-not-late John Shirley schooled me on the craft of writing, in several short sentences, to such a degree that I ran back to my suite and began fooling with a novel I’d been stuck on for three years, then got a bit misty about the optics because the whole plot had been so simple the whole time.
I just couldn’t see it. It was right in front of me and I couldn’t see it. Until someone else turned up the juice.
Both proof and exception to that rule came at a moment in my life that forever divided Before from After. It, too, concerned an elevator, in a textbook perversion of that rule that still won’t die in my dreams.
The night I shared an elevator with Jason Tillinghast and his g
reat-uncle’s machine.
Jason Tillinghast was as Portland as a solar-powered umbrella, and we were all tired of his schtick long ago. Because it wasn’t funny after a while. Every time he had a meltdown at some other writer or fan over some slight to his monstrous, undeserved ego, in public or private, he looked older the next time I saw him. More vacant. Less there.
The last time I saw Tillinghast was at Orycon the previous year. He stayed with all his people down in the bar, and I made sure to pointedly avoid the bar. (I do that a lot.) The usual. But when I saw him again, he was much transformed.
The saddest thing is that we all knew this was going to happen, just not When or What or precisely How. There was always one more issue up his sleeve, one more way to stir up nastiness. That all certainly got a whole lot more attention than his work, which I really did try to read. And really tried to like. I tried. But early on, the life surrounding the work generated an allergy.
Later on, the government guys (who never told me what branch they were with) had a lot to say off the record. They showed me a lot: Photos of a family home in Providence, Rhode Island, of all places, and a will stuck in probate to this very day. A burgled cellar. A whole swath of pissed-off relatives and ebay transactions concerning items in said will...
“And the great-uncle, he had kind of a...remote facility.” John, as he only ever identified himself, laughed that dry assassin’s laugh where we sat in the Mongolian grill two blocks away over meals neither of us could really stomach, not long after the Thing happened. “A lab that Dr. Tillinghast didn’t even tell his wife or his kids about. That’s where most of the...parts were,” here he looked strangely shamefaced, “But all the rest of those machines, the prototypes, that ol’ Crawford Tillinghast wrote about—”
I swallowed hard, finishing his sentence. “Gone.” All of a sudden, nowhere seemed safe.
John nodded slowly, crewcut head gleaming under the dull fluorescent bulbs over the back booth. “We have some of our best people in the field working on it now, Mr. Morris. It’ll get cleaned up.”
Resonator: New Lovecraftian Tales From Beyond Page 12